Henry Kiefer wrote:

You mentioned FM. I have a general question about the Tayloe mixer. Is it
possible to receive NBFM or FSK from VHF with it? I'm a little lost in the
question how to use the for outgoing phases or I/Q to demodulate FM. All I
found on the Net was doing shortwave SSB demodulation.

Provided you implement the Tayloe mixer with sufficient baseband
bandwidth (probably about 20 KHz for NBFM), you can mix, say, a 2 meter
FM signal to baseband and demodulate it with an audio discriminator
(some sort of audio frequency to voltage conversion scheme). Mix the
signal to be either exclusively in the upper or lower sideband of the
output. So, for example, a NBFM sig at 146.000 MHz mix with the Tayloe
mixer set to 145.990 MHz and select the upper sideband. The upper or
lower sidebands are, as you probably know, selected by phase shifting
and summing circuits following the Tayloe mixer (implemented in
software in SDRs). Note that SDRs like the Flex-Radio SDR 1000 do not
process incoming signals near 0 Hz anyway, but mix the desired signal
centered around about 11 KHz (I think).


Are there other analog switches going higher than the mentioned 70MHz for
FST3253 or 74HC4066? Perhaps video switches? What is better: Tayloe 4-phases
or a switched mixer with one output only? In the latter case I would need a
conventional IF filter after the switching mixer?


The Tayloe mixer is a passive mixer terminated in large capacitors, and
similar performance can be obtained at VHF, UHF and microwaves with two
FET ring mixers driven with quadrature signals and also terminated with
capacitors (that is, no wideband transformer on the mixer outputs, but
capacitors followed by HiZ input differential audio amps). I've done
this with the Peregrine Semiconductor FET mixers.

If I need a DSP at the baseband doing math with the phases or I/Q I would
think of an www.wavefrontsemi.com DSP AL3101/2CG DSP-1K will suffice? Wolud
it suffice? It is a little simple DSP mainly for doing FIR - but FAST and
with 24-bits including audio AD converters ip to 50KHz. The DSP runs with
50MHz up to 1000 instructions long until it repeats the prog. The nice think
is a very low pin-count package and cheap too.

There is maybe a middle way with a device like the www.cypress.com PSoC
family of mixed-mode Microcontroller with programmable analog cells. There
even exists a PSoC app note describing a heterodyne FSK receiver for 130KHz.

Maybe a www.microchip.com dsPIC is better?

Only familiar with the dsPIC, though the others sound okay. The dsPIC
would work, though its 12 bit A/D doesn't give a lot of dynamic range.
Plenty for NBFM though, especially since you can run the signal(s)
through a limiter first. For NBFM sixteen bit DSP is sufficient.

Regards,
Glenn