I accidentally set up a resonate circuit by having long traces and ferrites in the supply rails. It was interesting that it only showed up after adding the F…
I accidentally set up a resonate circuit by having long traces and ferrites in the supply rails. It was interesting that it only showed up after adding the F…
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
@FlyByPC FPGA is now generating the local oscilator. I’ll have more now
with it’s internal PLL.
The opposite sideband suppression looks pretty good judging by that
moderately strong CW signal close-in. RC filtering is often way better at
RF than ferrites, doesn’t give odd resonances except for capacitor
weirdness, the resistance de-Qs any resonances.
Wow. Amazing! With problems like that, all I would be able to do is put my
fingers in my ears and go “LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU, HARMONICS”. 😉
I’ve done a lot of debugging tricky circuits by literally using my fingers
to drop in a bit of capacitance or RF loss into a circuit to try to find
sensitive nodes or oscillating circuits (or overheating parts – ouch!).
Good stuff! What SDR software are you using again?
A random capacitor or a resistor to ground does seem to usually do the
trick for warding off many of these little gremlins! tymkrs
@Afrotechmods Fine until you spend ages wondering why things have suddenly
changed before you realise it’s because the battery is going flat…
@vk2zay I’ll have to play with the circuit a bit. I was trying to squelch
high frequency noise coming from the 74hc74, since it has very fast rise
times. I even series terminated the select lines to the 4066, which seemed
to help.
@FlyByPC There is no such thing as digital . Everything is analogue. Even
in something as ‘digital as an FPGA you can get marginal timings…
metastability… decoupling problems…
I agree with FLyByPC, you ignore analog(ue) effects in digital circuits at
your peril…
@w2aew Software – Winrad is a freeware SDR tool I found.
@markiduval Hah. “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a bucket of
capacitors…”
If you are not already doing so, may I suggest you use a battery to power
these initial prototypes? That way you are guaranteed minimal power supply
noise. Once everything is going well you can go back and tweak it for any
source you want.
This is why I prefer digital. With analog, it seems that there are so many
ways that the circuit could decide to do something else that it’s hard to
know where to start. Nice job tracking it down, though. It looks like the
TTL oscillators are out (or maybe they’re just hard to see from this angle)
— is the FPGA running the show now?