Defo not a failure, just the key to open up a new box of tricks. I changed
the vfo for s shop bought unit from ebay to start with then changed to
mixer and just kept on going. The end product is nothing like the original
concept but it got the juices flowing and thats what the hobby is all about.
On 18 February 2017 at 11:37, Dale Ward <adwsail@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A failure? Imho certainly not. And not because the Minima as designed was
a 'wire it up as shown and go' but because of the motivation it provided. I
went with a D.C. Receiver loosely based on W7EL's optimized Transceiver. In
my version I used a nano board driving an adafruit Si5351 LO into a 74AC00
with -11db pad into an SBL-1 mixer. That was followed by a diplexer and LNA
into 2 sections of NE5532 for audio gain into a tiny class D amp to drive a
speaker. Stunning performance and over a years worth of learning to get it
all working. The modular approach with careful 50 ohm matching of each
section made it simple to try countless iterations of oscillator, passive
filters, audio high gain stages, etc. and, at least for me, my deepest
thanks to Farhan for his inspiration.
The only true failure comes from not even trying.