News, Updates and Other Minutiae
September 2023 Long time between drinks, but not much happening on the tech front at the moment. Added another couple of rants to the rant page.
January 2023 Updated the AD9833 VFO code to use a 12F1840.
December 2022 Added rant about todays useless (internet) search engines.
November 2022 NEW Project An AD9833 Based Simple VFO. FT101ZD VFO project updated.
October 2022 A replacement internal DDS VFO for FT101Z/ZD rigs. Because the worlds postage system has gone totally bonkers and it is not possible to send a small pcb anywhere except at extreme cost, I am slowly making available the option to purchase pcb's from Pcbway. First up is the Simple DDS VFO 2017 project pcb. Others will be added over time. Noise Canceller kits available again- see Noise Canceller page.
Privacy Policy uploaded. GPDR and all that stuff In accordance with various bits of legislation around the world, either currently in force, about to come into force or proposed, you will now find that annoying "We use cookies" notice at the top of this website. The full Privacy Policy is available at the Privacy Policy link in the footer at the bottom of the page. (If you don't know what GPDR is, Google it. Real scary shit for ANYBODY with a web presence.)
3v3 DDS Module Mods
There have been various discussions on the net about 3v3 versions of the cheap Chinese DDS modules. It seems to affect only the AD9850 modules. In fact, if you look carefully at some of the images on the popular selling sites, you can see 3v3 engraved into some of the oscillator modules. Some are not that obvious however. If you are lucky, you may have a module with a manufacturers mark and code on it that you can look up. Otherwise, the only other possible way of telling is, that when running, the 3v3 oscillator blocks will get warm to the touch. I can only conclude that these modules are 'mistakes' or 'rejects', because the AD9850 is only rated to an oscillator value of 110MHz at 3v3 and the AD9851 125MHz at 3v3. See the link between the two? How well they run like this I don't know, as my modules are definitely 5v oscillator types. Egbert PA0EJH, sent me an email with the details of his fix for this situation, along with a note to say that the 3v3 oscillator on his modules died after a week running at 5v. The extra components are shown in red. Click pic for larger version.
The other obvious solution is to replace the oscillator module with a known 5v version if you feel so inclined. So if yours have suddenly stopped working, this may be why.
