PICASTAR build from Bucharest, Traian, YO9FZS/p
Dear Glenn
Here we (me and my friend Eugen YO3FXN) are still working on the two Star trx. The progress is slow, as gathering the parts is not so easy here because they have to be bought from many different external sources (which mean expensive), and no much spare time for it.
Right now, the DSP boards are ok, Pic'n mix and DDS are also ok, the IF and MR are almost completed (except for two toroids and 10,715M crystal). Could not find TOKO coils for the BPF, got the Coilcraft ones, but found unusual high insertion loss for the 40m (9,5 dB), 60m (7 dB) and -of course- 30m (18 dB). The low bands IL is acceptable (3,5 dB for 80m and 4,5 dB for 160m). The IL for the higher bands is good (about 2 dB). Tried different capacitor values for the 40m band, tried both yours and G6ALU cap values for different band coverage, but no much improvement regarding the IL. Will see further about, maybe will try some ferrite toroids for this band.
We can not find the needed 10,715 kHz quartz crystals for the IF board, even if I had put some on line advertisements here. Trying to pull some available 10,700 MHz crystals (including ones dismantled from 25 kHz wide FM filters) was unsuccessfull; this was to be expected, as I found that the 10,700 freq is the parallel resonance, not the series one... Getting the 10,715 MHz crystals may be the most dificult problem here. Had search in Europe for a single source for all of the magnetic cores (toroids for the FI, the two TX amplifiers and LPF, and binocular cores) but had no success, we may need to get them from two or more separate sources.
Will have to buy the power RF MOSFETs from RF Parts.
Here are attached some pictures from the BPF board; some other pictures during assembling the boards are here
http://www.hawk.ro/tr/star/ I thought that pictures from LSI soldering may be usefull; you may include any of them on your website if needed.
I had right buying the PCBs from you, I would not have the needed spare time for to make my own PCBs... thank you!
The single board Star seems a very good idea....
TNX & 73 from Bucharest, Traian, YO9FZS/p
Hover over pictures, some can be clicked for larger image
Very nice build.
