Ultimate3 QRSS kit - page 7

Ultimate3 QRSS kit - continue  building and testing

 

To get more information about the state of the system I added 2 leds to give me information about the voltages regulators (when the up and running or not) and 2 leds to indicate low or high output power (if the +5V is used to drive the BS170's or the +9V).

 

http://www.bolkesteijn.nl/blog/images/hamradio/ultimate3/ultimate3_026.jpg

In the back there is now a on/off switch above the DC chassis part and a aditional switch which allowes me to apply +5V or the +9V to the BS170's.

http://www.bolkesteijn.nl/blog/images/hamradio/ultimate3/ultimate3_025.jpg

Interiour photo and close-up on the power regulators. There is still room for a small power filter to prevent HF leaking out over the DC line.

http://www.bolkesteijn.nl/blog/images/hamradio/ultimate3/ultimate3_027.jpg

Other interieur photo.

http://www.bolkesteijn.nl/blog/images/hamradio/ultimate3/ultimate3_028.jpg

 

This evening I couldn't resist to switch on the Ultimate3 again and after a while i got quite surprised. At 20:14 VK7BO spotted me with a SNR of -30 in grid QE38mo. Which means the signal has found a path over 16818 km.

 

The next thing to fix was to find out why I still have drift on the 10 and 20m band. One thing I know was that the GPS I was using wasn't the best one there is thing was allread 10 years old and not really state of the art. Also I know that my configurations had some troubles with the high frequencies.

Gerrit Vinke (PA3DWC) pointed me out that there was a know issue :

A zero park frequency is the same behaviour as in v2.04. However please note
that it appears that on some DDS modules, this causes a frequency drift during the next key-down. This will be worse on higher transmission frequencies than lower. It can be bad enough to prevent WSPR decodes.

Check out the operation manual v.3.02

 

Well that sounded just like the problem I have. I did switch the DDS of the parameters set to 3. Which could like 2 have some issues on the higher frequencies. Changing the Park setting to 0 seems to make the drift beter. But maybe option 1 also may work.

 

Continue reading on next page : page 8 - new gps