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Friday, 6 September 2013

Bench Sig Gen - Any bright ideas?

Well,

Been fiddling around at home today and building a bench RF Signal Generator. I have a homebrew one already but it's a bit hit and miss to tune, I also have an old Avo valve based signal generator, but that's extremely heavy, very large and generates lots of heat!

I saw a schematic for a suitable bench Signal Generator a while ago in Experimental Methods in RF Design (page 7.15 Fig 7.27), so I thought I would have a go at making one.

Here's what it looks like in it's current state of construction:



The tuning capacitor on the RHS is the main tuning and the second variable capacitor on the LHS is the fine tuning; that should help make it easier to set the device.


The toroid you can see nearest the front of the picture above is a little odd; the secondary is just a single turn which in reality is the leg of the diode you can see just passing through the centre.

I then found in my box labeled "projects" a digital dial kit from QRP kits:

http://www.qrpkits.com/freqcounter.html

I've used these in projects in the past and I must have ordered an extra one some time ago, anyhow as this is a surface mount project, it was extreme soldering time again. If anyone doesn't realise how small these components are, here's one of the resistors on my thumb nail:


So, here is the underside of the project board completed:


And the display side:


Ideally you would calibrate this with as high a frequency as possible, but I have used my 10MHz frequency standard from here:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/ocxo-oh-you-mean-ocxo.html

And here is the counter connected to the signal generator, I've added an additional buffer output stage between the output PAD and the counter in my build:


So, the output of the new bench Signal Generator looks quite good, here's some shots of the device set at 10MHz exactly:




This now needs a case, but I am going to wait until the end of the month when I will be at the National Hamfest and see if I can find anything there. I'm away between now and then in A71 land so it will just have to wait.

There is an expression about curiosity and cats:



Good though, egh?

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