Anyone following Hackaday and other hobby electronics blogs/YouTube channels has probably noticed the buzz around the NanoVNA lately. Admittedly I don’t know a lot about it, other than the fact that the design and firmware is open source and now a bunch of Chinese manufacturers have started making it and that you can now get… Read More Onto the NanoVNA Bandwagon
Arduino – Si5351 Powered Signal Generator Please enjoy this write-up of a nifty, compact signal generator project using the Etherkit Si5351A Breakout Board driven by a Teensy LC. What I really love about it is that it uses an 18650 LiPo cell with a small USB charge controller, so that it is very portable. Neat stuff!
OpenTechLab If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time, you’ve probably observed that I’m a big fan of all things open source, especially on the hardware side of things. One area where OSHW seems to be lagging a bit is in the test & measurement department, so it was a very pleasant… Read More Wideband Transmission #10
Arduino in the Cloud I saw a recent post on the Make blog about the new cloud ecosystem for Arduino which has been dubbed Arduino Create. Since this will most likely be the future of Arduino, it seemed wise to get an early look at the platform. It includes quite a few features, but the… Read More Wideband Transmission #9
Back when I was working at Tektronix (wow, this summer it’s been 10 years since I graduated with a AAS in EET and started at Tek), they had a one-time program where an employee could purchase a new TDS1000/2000 series oscilloscope for half of the list price. This was back in the day before the… Read More TDS1012 LED Backlight Retrofit
Just a few days ago, I finally received some of the TCXO parts that I’ve been planning on using with the Si5351A Breakout Board. I had no problem using one on the remaining prototype circuit board that I have, and at first glance it appeared quite stable and also very close to the nominal frequency… Read More Si5351A with TCXO Update
In looking through the analytics here on the blog, I noticed a search term that has been regularly coming up near the top: Si5351 crosstalk. Realizing that I haven’t yet presented data on this, it seemed like a good time to knock this one out, since it isn’t that difficult of a measurement to make.… Read More Si5351A Investigations Part 8
A look into the intermod properties of a BF991 amplifier.… Read More Dual Gate MOSFET Investigations – Intermodulation
Here’s the post I know that a lot of you have been waiting for. Buzz around the Si5351 has been picking up at a pretty rapid clip over the last month or so, but a lot of homebrewers have been hesitant to use it in their designs because one critical parameter has not yet been… Read More Si5351A Investigations Part 7
I’ve got a lot of project ideas rattling around my head. Got even more of them in my notebook. One of the projects floating around in there for years that seemed pretty cool, but not urgent, was an automated thermal chamber for oscillator stability testing, roughly based on the one seen at the end of chapter… Read More Si5351A Investigations Part 4