On Thu, 05 Mar 2015 22:01:39 +0000, Iain Young, G7III wrote:

A HF upverter added to the front end, and you are all set.

Very simple project, a cheap DIL crystal oscillator around 50MHz,
passive mixer with the ports switched around and you have a LF/MF/HF RX
from DC. Some front end filtering and Bob's your unc.



Charlie
M0WYM


--
Hello Wisconsin!

In message , Charlie
writes
On Thu, 05 Mar 2015 22:01:39 +0000, Iain Young, G7III wrote:

A HF upverter added to the front end, and you are all set.

Very simple project, a cheap DIL crystal oscillator around 50MHz,
passive mixer with the ports switched around and you have a LF/MF/HF RX
from DC. Some front end filtering and Bob's your unc.

My first 2m QSO was made with a CB set feeding into a home-made
double-balanced diode mixer, and an ancient sig gen as the LO on 118 (or
maybe 177) MHz.



--
Ian

On 06/03/2015 13:32, Ian Jackson wrote:
In message , Charlie
writes
On Thu, 05 Mar 2015 22:01:39 +0000, Iain Young, G7III wrote:

A HF upverter added to the front end, and you are all set.

Very simple project, a cheap DIL crystal oscillator around 50MHz,
passive mixer with the ports switched around and you have a LF/MF/HF RX
from DC. Some front end filtering and Bob's your unc.

My first 2m QSO was made with a CB set feeding into a home-made
double-balanced diode mixer, and an ancient sig gen as the LO on 118 (or
maybe 177) MHz.

An interesting variation on the typical 28MHz 2m transverter. I'm a
bit surprised there were suitable CB sets around at the time I would
expect you to be starting our on 2m.

I've never been keen on transverters myself. I still have a Microwave
Modules 2m 70 cm transverter somewhere, they were very popular in the
early 1980s or so. It worked well enough it was the need to keep
swapping things around I didn't like. Fine if you dedicate a radio for
use with the transverter but, in those days, I didn't have the luxury of
suitable radios to do that.

On 05/03/15 16:04, gareth wrote:

Now, it is possible that with the onset of SDR, that such an
approach would be obselescent, but SDR itself is already notorious
for being an off-the-shelf Cheque Book (CB) approach both for
the hardware and also the software.

Would you describe gnuradio or Matlab as an "off the shelf"
approach ?

The schematics for the Ettus range of USRPs and daughterboards are
available, anyone so inclined could build their own should they
choose rather than purchasing one. See
http://files.ettus.com/schematics/

I've published examples of gnuradio flowgraphs before, so wont repeat
them, but you can get a DVB dongle for about 6 UKP from ebay, for which
gnuradio has drivers for.

There are plenty of other examples out on the internet, why not give
gnuradio a try ? It really isn't off-the-shelf, and you will have to
twiddle bits and pieces (gain levels, squelch values, filter widths
etc to get things exactly how you want them)

I look forward to comparing your flowgraphs to my own methods


73s

Iain