Cycle to work and back, plus a bit extra

Hmmm... soldering is a bit blobby, but all the bits are on the board. I find 0603 components are about as small as I can do with a pair of tweezers and a soldering iron.

I'll clean off the flux after I've soldered on the coax cable. I'm going to look for some miniature PTFE 50 ohm coax at the radio fair on Saturday, but I have some 75 ohm UR111 which will probably do. It will, after all, be feeding a length of RG6 75 ohm coax to the satellite receiver. 73 Hugh

Here's a photo of the old Minicircuits MAR-6 amplifier which I built ages ago.

The actual amplifier is the little black dot in the middle. The p.c.b. is etched with a hacksaw. I used a junior hacksaw to cut gaps in the copper. The width of the strips do approximate to 50 ohm stripline. It may be crude but it worked well enough to receive TV pictures from G6EXU about 7 miles away, using a modified Amstrad SRX100 Satellite receiver. 73 Hugh

Today the SPF Amplifier kit arrived from Sam Jewel G4DDK. It is all very small and will easily fit in the space currently occupied by the Minicircuits MAR-6 amplifier on the back of the BiQuad antenna.

Sam has cleverly colour coded the surface mount parts so they are easily identifiable on the parts list.... that is until you take them out of the cardboard strip. Better put them on the board one at a time. The SPF amp has a noise figure of 0.8dB which compares very favourably with the Minicircuits MAR-6 which is about 2dB. Sam has sensibly advised a filter between the antenna and the amp as the amplifier is very wideband. However, since the MAR-6 worked ok, I think I shall try it without, and see how we get on. I now need to find some miniature PTFE coax to connect to this. 73 Hugh

Fast ride home

So this area is to get a new 23cms ATV repeater.  http://herc-hastings.org.uk/gb3jt-repeater
It would be nice to be able to view the output.