BITX20 - 10. BFO / Modulation section done.

ARRGHHH i was tricked.... well i just did not read stuff good enough...
There were 2 coils... one not that bad, but the other was the 3rd dreaded trifilar coil....
And i know that for the exciter board i still have to make one. (and 2 i believe for the PA)

Anyway , the rest of the build was fast and painless.... (except for the manual saying 50uF, and them supplying 47uF) (also a normal fitting potentio meter would have been nice)
So lets not complain :)

Measuring all showed me no weird things... Just the normal difference... measurments just never seem to be exact :)

Audio section is next.... And now i checked the list... no coils :)

BITX20 - 9. Building and meassuring the 2nd IF Amplifier

Oh how much joy building none coil parts :)......
So the 2nd IP Amplifier was done in no time..... and i enjoyed it a lot!

Does any1 notice the 1 resistor being a different color ????
Yes indeed , 1 resistor was not included in the complete package. a 4.7 Ohm resistor.
Luckily i had one in stock.

Measuring this part was fun as well.....
There is a Q3 and a Q3a transistor.... and in the manual they have mixed up the value's what you should measure. So this again is one of the quirks from the BITX20 kit.
So if it says Q3, read Q3a , and if it says Q3a, read Q3..... And remember that this is a $100 kit :)

On to the next part !!! (still has no coils ;) )

BITX20 - 8. Building the 1st IF amplifier

After finally having done the trifilar coils, i felt like building more :).
So i builded the 1st IF Amp as well last night. It's all very straight forward.
I do not expect any problems here. This is how it looks......

Again you can see that the transistors are "the wrong way around" to the masking on the print itself....
This is still due to the change of transistor type Sunil has put in his kits. From what i have read on his blog, the new v3 kits should have a proper masking again, but i am not sure.
I intend to do all the measuring after i get myself another cup of tea.... Luckily the whole test setup from last night is still on my desk , so i can start straight away. I do not expect anything weird here so probably the next post will be on building the post if part....

BITX20 - 7. Building and measuring the "First Mixer"

This is by far the most dreaded part for me.... I don't know why, but i just do not like to wind coils.....
So that is the reason i have been putting it off for so long.... But! i forced myself to do it and.....

TAADAAA!!!!
There are the 1st two trifilar coils. Thank god that was done. Putting in the 4 1n4148 diodes was easy , so now this very small section looks like this....

After this we finally could measure voltages on the last transistor of the vfo part, and that turned out fine.
On to the next part !!!

BITX20 - 6. Measuring the VFO

Just a small progress update on the BITX.....
A while back i build the vfo part and started to do all the measuring as discribed in the manual....
Unfortunately the value's described in the manual is no where near what it should be....
So i emailed an other ham operator who has build 2 already to see if my value's rang a bell....
And they did :) thanks PD1ED.

I am sure other people will have the same experience... So i will share this info as well.
Or, if you are into yahoo groups, do join the BITX20 group there. It's a real goos source of info.

Current drain, 34,8mA, not 44,4mA

Q5:
E: 7.21v 4.76v
B: 6.96v 4.87v
C: 8.48v 9.88v

Q6

E: 6.36v 3.99v
B: 7.08v 4.66v
C: 8.48v 9.89v

You can see how much the difference is and then, if not told you will start to worry like me.
(These are my measurements, please remember that they can differ to yours as components, testleads and multimeter's have various deviations)

Well , next weekend on to making transformers....

73's
Alex

A new toy in the shack.. a TS-440 SAT

A few days ago i managed to get my hands on a set which i wanted for quite a while....
Even though i have a "Mobile" TS-480" i wanted a 2nd set just for field days.
The TS-480 is still scratch less and i did not want to make it look used.... So every time we went for a field day the 480 was put in a little case with loads of cloth. You can imaging that this is not an ideal situation.

So i finally bought a TS-440 (obviously 2nd/3rd/4th hand).... Its in very good condition if you keep in mind that this set at newest is 16 yrs old. (at least , i think they stopped producing it in 1996 like the R5000)
The person who sold it unfortunately smoked like a continues chimney together with the whole family, but he sold it for someone else who was a non smoker so the set is not clutterd with nicotine and tar residue.
He was also not really technical and had no idea if it had a tuner. (i wonder if he knows what a tuner is)
As i use a zs6bkw antenna in the field, i do need a tuner....
So i took a gamble and i drove to the other side of the country..... about 100 minutes in the car for a one way trip. And here it is !

And... to be honest, it sounds great.... there is just something with older analogue equipment compared to newer digital stuff.

As the seller was not really the most intelligent person i ever met (not saying he was dumb , just not educated in the HAM stuff) he had no idea what to anser my questions.... i did not bother and bought the set anyway...
So to get my answers... a) any filters inside b) do i still need an IF-10 set ic's for computer control... i opend up the set this morning..... And yes , it has the 2.4 ssb filter installed, no CW though.... and when i opend up the display cover i notices that the 2 extra ic's were allready there ! Sometimes i am lucky... mostly not though :)

So you might wonder is there is some negative thing? Yes there is... one thing is that it has keybounce on the band change buttons... but its minimal... second is that the powercord is SHORT :). so i have to fix that befor the field days :)

Merry Xmas and a happy new year!!!

Hello everyone!!

Just a little post to give my best wishes to everyone who reads my blog or follows my on twitter etc,,,
I  hope you will have a wonderfull xmas with lots of love an joy and DX.....

For the upcoming year i wish you all the best, have a great new years eve, and watch out with the fireworks!

Hope to see you  here soon again, or even better, hear you on the air!

geetings,
Alex PA1SBM and YL