Category Archives: UHF Experiments

A place for my experiments in the Amateur UHF spectrum

ADALM Pluto Atomic Locked !

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Now that the KK103c1 firmware is finished and capable of generating a 40MHz carrier that is phase locked to my 10MHz Rubidium reference, it’s now time to test everything is indeed working.

ADALM Pluto External Clock Input

So up until now I’ve talked a lot about the ADLAM Pluto Clock input, but as yet have not shown where it is or what it does. From the Analog Devices Pluto University the following image below shows all of the inputs and outputs on the ADLAM Pluto. I’ll be feeding the KK103c1 into the “CLK IN” port, which is one of those lovely UFL connectors that are difficult to plug in without glasses or hellish with fat fingers, sigh.

So to make sure the “CLK IN” will work, we can look closely at the schematic for the Rev-C/D hardware and see what is there.

As per my previous post, the Connor Winfield VCO was not happy driving into a 50Ω load. It would also appear that the ADLAM Pluto has the same input impedance provided by resistor R96. Looking at the output of the KK103c1 driving into a 50 load, I see the output drop to +/-0.46Vp-p which is only just above the minimum input of the LTC6957 buffer being used to re-clock this input. So while this works, I will need to revisit this level and look at if I increase R96 to 200R to improve the signal levels provided by the KK103c1. Good enough for government work at this point in time. There is also a capacitor value that I can change to balance the KK103c1 output signal with the ADF4110 REFIN pin, to be investigated further.

Test Setup

Once the External Clock Input was checked, the KK103c1 was connected by a short UFL-UFL lead to ADALM Pluto. I typically use a pair of tweezers and a microscope to get these things connected. The test setup is shown in the image below.

The 10MHz Rubidium reference was feeding both the Rigol external reference input and the KK103c1 module in the foreground. Again the Icom R10 was being used to listen to the carrier for any signs of instability, usually heard as clicks or warbling. I again used SDRangel to set the ADALM Pluto into transmit on 1296.5MHz wanting to keep this up towards the upper range of the Rigol scope so that any minor changes in the 40MHz clock would show up as error in the output frequency. I also deliberately de-tuned the VCO with the 10MHz reference not present to test that the PLL was in fact going into power down.

Internal vs External Clock Input

Below are the results from configuring the ADLAM Pluto to use it’s own internal oscillator vs the external 40MHz KK103c1 output. The following article from AMSAT DK goes through the process of switching the Pluto from it’s internal clock to external. The span has been reduced to 50kHz and the vertical scale changed to allow the spectrum analyser to find the peak. The results speak for themselves, that’s a lot of zeros.

ADLAM Pluto output, external 40MHz clock, 50kHz span
ADALM Pluto output, Internal Oscillator, 50kHz span

As can be seen in the image above. With the ADLAM Pluto configured to use the internal oscillator, there is 15kHz of error in the output signal, that simply disappears when clocked using the external 40MHz source. This was confirmed having to re-tune the Icom R10 to follow this change in output.

I’m certainly pleased with this result.

Carrier Spurs from external clock

It is typical to see Spurs appear if the reference oscillator does not have a clean or jitter free output. Widening the span to 10MHz and 100MHz respectfully, the output of the ADLAM Pluto remained spur free. Well at least within the limits of the Rigol DANL. There is some close in phase noise that needs to be checked with better equipment and perhaps when boxed.

ADLAM Pluto output, external 40MHz clock, 10MHz span
ADALM Pluto output, external 40MHz clock, 100MHz span.

Next Steps…

I still have to investigate the phase noise from the KK103c1 module when the opportunity presents. I will also be investigating the harmonic output of the Pluto Charon at the same time that phase measurements are made, the poor old Rigol is limited to an upper frequency limit of 1500MHz. Unfortunately the Rigol Spectrum Analyser is not quite metrology grade lab equipment, so this will all have to wait for a bit longer.

Now that I have the output of the ADLAM Pluto locked to my Rubidium source, it’s time to begin boxing this up into an enclosure with the Pluto Charon kit and finishing my 23cm all mode digital SDR radio.

Onwards and Upwards !

ADALM Pluto Frequency Accuracy

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In a recent post I had my ADLAM Pluto transmitting using SDRangel on 1296.5MHz listening to it using an Icom R10 receiver. One thing that I did immediately notice was I had to tune the R10 down 15-18kHz to get both systems “on” frequency. One or both of them had to be off frequency, so which one was it ? After a few measurements with a spectrum analyser, I found the ADALM Pluto was the culprit, surprisingly the Icom R10 was within a 100Hz of where it was supposed to be.

So… the ADALM Pluto was at least 16.667kHz low using its internal 40MHz crystal reference, that is not going to cut the mustard on these higher bands.

I had always planned on phase locking the Pluto to an external 10MHz Rubidium reference. The only catch is the external reference input on the Pluto expects a 40MHz clock and the AD9361 transceiver within the Pluto, cannot be configured to use a reference clock much below 25MHz. So there was no way I was going to make this work with a 10MHz reference without adding something in between.

After some further research I decided I needed a 40MHz VCO that I could phase lock to the external 10MHz reference to solve my problem with the Pluto external clock input. A chance discussion at a conference in Tasmania at the end of 2024 lead me to laying my hands on a KK103c1 40MHz VCTXCO PCBA designed and built by David VK5KK.

David’s 40MHz VCTCXO design was published in Dubus Q3/2022. It was designed as a daughter board directly connected to an Arduino Nano, that it conveniently sits on top of. The specs for this board were perfect for what I was planning to do with the Pluto external clock input;

Ref In:     10MHz, -4dBm to +14dBm
Output:     40MHz ~1.0Vp-p (into 200R)
VCO:        Connor Winfield T604
PLL:        Analog Devices ADF4110
Micro:      Arduino Nano ATMEGA328p

Both the VCO and PLL are low phase noise varieties and the power supply decoupling is extensive. I was even given a basic Arduino sketch that I could use to test the board, that is provided I had an Arduino Nano. Oh well Nano ordered and should be here soon.

Certainly once I have this board running, I’ll be doing some phase noise measurements and experiments with my Rubidium 10MHz reference. It will be interesting to see what improvement I get in frequency accuracy, along with comparing the phase noise of the internal Pluto clock and seeing if there are any differences. However before this I’ll need to write some Arduino code to tailor this board for my purposes and perhaps a library to drive the ADF4110. That will of course land somewhere in my GitHub repository when ready.

I’ll give a shout out and my personal thanks to David VK5KK for gifting me one these boards and accelerating my ADLAM Pluto project. I certainly can’t wait to get to testing once the postman delivers a Arduino Nano. I know I’ve got some Nano’s somewhere, but for the life me of I can’t find that box.

More to come.

ADLAM Pluto SDR and LMDE

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So it’s been a while since I’d looked at my ADLAM Pluto SDR project, to complicate matters I’ve also recently switched to Linux. So it was time to see if I could find new SDR software to drive it.

After a few false starts and some trials and tribulations, I finally settled on SDRangel. I’ve used this app before to demodulate a High Altitude Balloon payload that transmitted a quirky DVB-T modulator using a RTL-SDR and Ubuntu Laptop.

So the only problem, SDRangel is written to natively run on Ubuntu, Windows, Mac and the rest of the distros can either use a snap package or compile from source. Sigh. Linux Mint does not like snaps, LMDE uses only flatpak’s.

SDRangel Flatpak

Now I’m not a big fan of flatpak’s either, to me they are in the same boat as snaps and docker images, unnecessarily slow, however after reading how to compile SDRangel from source, a flatpak was certainly the fastest and easiest way to let me try the software and see if I can get this working.

Thankfully I found SDRangel on Flathub. The following was all I had to do from a command line to install the flatpak, installation instructions were found here.

$ sudo flatpak install flathub org.sdrangel.SDRangel

After a short time downloading and installing it was ready.

SDR plugable UDEV Rules

SDRAngel requires udev rules to be added for the most common SDR’s, since I also intend to try RTL-SDR’s at some point, now as as good as any time to install.

The udev rules can be found here on the SDRangel GitHub repo. I simply downloaded them in a zip file to my local downloads directory, unzipped and moved them into /etc/udev/rules.d. There is an installation script (install.sh) in that same directory as the downloaded udev rules you can use or read for inspiration on the linux commands necessary.

If you find that you still can’t access these devices, check your user has the right permissions to use USB or network devices, trap for young players and outside the scope of this post. Google and Duck-Duck-Go has lots to say on this topic.

Flatpak Permissions

Before starting SDRangel I also loaded Flatseal and checked what permissions the SDRangel flatpak was requesting. Always pays to review flatpaks using Flatseal, I’ve found a few packages that had some very odd permissions and didn’t work on LMDE out of the box.

It makes sense to me to grant SDRangel access to the network, PulseAudio sound server, GPU acceleration (if used), All devices (i.e. SDR’s) and the “Run in Background” option. This is the config that worked for me, YMMV.

SDRangel Configuration

Once SDRangel is loaded, we’re greeted with a big blank screen. From here I added the ADLAM Pluto by clicking Preferences > Devices > User Arguments

I then added “PlutoSDR” in the HwID field, left seq as 0 and hit the ‘+” button which is the add symbol. I then selected the PlutoSDR entry in the lower pane, added “uri=ip:192.168.2.1” in the Args field, and hit OK. After I’d finished my config screen looked like this. Note my IP is the default PlutoDVB value, you can find what yours is set to in the config.txt file from the Pluto storage device it presents when connected to a PC. Now apparently you need to restart SDRangel for this to have any effect. YMMV.

Adding a RX Device

I then added an RX device by clicking on the menu button just to the right of the purple button with a play symbol in it. If you hover over each button, a pop up appears telling you what the button is. From the drop down box, I then selected the PlutoSDR entry which was right towards the bottom of the list.

Two screens appear, but we’ll concentrate on them one at a time. I configured the Receive window like this, more info here;

Now the thing to note. I’ve twiddled the sampling rate for reasons I’ll explain in another post. You should find the initial settings of 2.5MHz work well enough out of the box. I’ve increased the decimation from 1 to 8 in the S field, likewise I’ve selected “slow” AGC. If you then press the purple button with the white play symbol, you would see the next window start to do something interesting like this.

I didn’t change anything here, the out of the box config just worked for me. Now you might notice you don’t hear anything, that is because you have to add a channel/separate demodulator. On the receive window, just to the left of where “PlutoSDR[0:0]” appears is a button you can click to add a channel.

From the pull down box I’d choose the SSB Demodulator, which will appear on your screen. I configured it like this;

I had to play around with the sound settings, especially the audio settings which were hidden under the green speaker symbol (right click) on the right side of the screen just above the Channel Spectrum display. It is worth spending the time to read the documentation on the SDRangel website, once you realise that each part is a software plugin and how configurable this system is things get more interesting.

By the time we have the receiver configured, the spectrum display happening and a channel defined, audio should be appearing out of your speakers. If not then you’ll need to spend a bit more time debugging what’s happened with PulseAudio, mine just came to life.

I’ll also mention that if you try the Narrow Band FM channel plugin, there is a hidden squelch power threshold setting, that you need to wind down to -100 for it to open the squelch and produce white noise. It’s just to the right of “Sq” and a funny button with a triangle on it, you’ll see what I mean.

Adding a TX Device

I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here. I found a great article on the web and a video on YouTube from SignalsEverywhere that explained how to configure the ADLAM Pluto to transmit. You can find the original article from the RTL-SDR site here and the video embedded below;

Putting it all together

To prove that I could get this all working, I put the receiver on 1296.5MHz with the settings previously shown. I configured the transmitter slightly differently adding further decimation to reduce the effective bandwidth. You can see this below;

I then added a Narrow Band Modulator, by clicking the button just to the left of where “PlutoSDR[0:0]” appears in the menu bar (just like a channel button in a receive window) and selecting NFM Modulator from the drop down box. You then configure like so, based entirely on SignalsEverywhere’s YT video.

If you click on the purple button with the white triangle on the TX window, you should be greeted by CW being sent. Just so there was proof, I made and uploaded my own video.

In the above video the audio is being demodulated by the Icom R10 on 1296.5MHz NBFM just so that there was a “Real Radio (TM)” involved. The ADLAM Pluto is transmitting approximately 0dBm into a dummy load. The ADLAM Pluto receiver is displaying the received signal and waterfall, I didn’t bother with a channel/demodulator to listen to my own transmission, the R10 was doing a good enough job on it’s own.

So now that I’ve got that working, I can start to experiment with the ADLAM Pluto and some microwave multipliers to get me up into the higher bands. I also need to check it will still key the Pluto Charon kit and modify as necessary. More to this story shortly.

Further Pluto PTT issues…

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In my last post on the Pluto External PTT I had done some preliminary testing of the external PTT output using a multi-meter before wiring it to the Pluto Charon and confirming it worked. It was at this point things took a jump to the left and then a step to the right…

What I noticed is I would hit the TX button in SDR-Console and there would be a pause, one, two, three, then click would go the transmit receive (TRX) relay. Hmm that’s not going to do, a 3s delay between the PC software PTT and the Pluto Charon external amplifier ain’t going to work on FM/SSB.

However if I hit the TX button in SDR-Console again the TRX relay would click and go off without any delay. Now that was strange and the asymmetric nature of operation required further investigation.

The first step was to rule out the hardware, so with a C.R.O on the Pluto Charon PTT line (connector A1) and another on the ADALM Pluto GPO0 pin (yellow and cyan respectively) we can check that the switching is nice and clean.

Nope nothing to see here, you can see the transistor on the Pluto Charon PTT board pulling the PTT line low and hitting zero volts in no more than 12us. Problem has to be elsewhere.

So now were into firmware and software territory, sigh this is going to be one of those rabbit holes.

I firstly tried the “for the brave” firmware that can be found on the Mini-kits support website, which is an early version of the PlutoDVB firmware. This changed the behavior entirely and there was a delay of 1-1.5s each time the external PTT changed state from ON to OFF. Not what I wanted, but better and perhaps more usable than the 3s ON and instant OFF I was seeing on the PlutoDVB revision 3.0.3 firmware + Rev C/D patch.

Further reading from the analog devices website suggested that the GPO pin connected my external PTT module could be controlled by some ENSM module within the AD9361-phy linux driver, so I tried some experiments with SDR-Console and the Analog Devices stock v0.38 firmware, that didn’t work either. It was clear that SDR-Console was not using this IIO method to switch the Pluto in to TX or RX.

So I revisited the latest PlutoDVB firmware (perseverance 3.0.3 + Rev C/D patch) once again reading and watching more closely this time.

It was while applying the patch I saw something interesting, I’ve highlighted it in red adjacent. I wonder what that script does ?

The whole reason the patch was required in PlutoDVB Perseverance 3.0.3 firmware was to get the PTT working with revision C & D hardware. I wonder if that is where I start ?

So let me log into the Pluto and take a peek at the script.

#!/bin/sh
#https://www.analog.com/media/cn/technical-documentation/user-guides/AD9364_Register_Map_Reference_Manual_UG-672.pdf
source /root/device_sel.sh
ptton()
{
    #PTT on GPIO 0 AND GPIO 2 (GPIO 1 should be not touched)
    echo 0x27 0x50 > /sys/kernel/debug/iio/iio:device$dev/direct_reg_access
    mosquitto_pub -t plutodvb/status/tx -m true
}

pttoff()
{
    echo 0x27 0x00 > /sys/kernel/debug/iio/iio:device$dev/direct_reg_access
    mosquitto_pub -t plutodvb/status/tx -m false
}

echo manual_tx_quad > /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device$dev/calib_mode
#Manual GPIO
echo 0x26 0x10 > /sys/kernel/debug/iio/iio:device$dev/direct_reg_access
pttoff

while :
do
inotifywait -e modify /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio\:device$dev/out_voltage0_hardwaregain
gain=$(cat /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device$dev/out_voltage0_hardwaregain)
if [ "$gain" = "-40.000000 dB" ] ; then
    echo "SdrConsole PTT OFF"
    pttoff
else
    if [ "$gain" = "0.000000 dB" ] ; then
        sleep 2
        gain=$(cat /sys/bus/iio/devices/iio:device$dev/out_voltage0_hardwaregain)
        if [ "$gain" = "0.000000 dB" ] ; then
            echo "SdrConsole Power Max PTT ON"
            ptton
        fi
        else
            echo "SdrConsole PTT ON"
            ptton
        fi
    fi
done

So reading my way through this script by the time I hit line 24 I had confirmed

  • SDR-Console does not use the ENSM module within the Pluto ad9361-phy driver
  • Instead the script uses the sysfs subsystem to read different values from the IIO driver
  • SDR-Console varies the TX gain within the IIO driver between two limits that the script interprets and drives the relevant GPO pin
  • In an attempt to prevent a race condition, line 31 introduces a 2s sleep function between successive reads of the gain value

Guess where the 3s delay I’ve been searching for comes from !?!

So a quick bit of hacking on this script, changing line 31 to read “sleep 0.1” or 100ms, then restarting the “watchconsoletx.sh” process increased the speed of the external PTT to the point where the delay between SDR-Console and the TRX relay on the Pluto Charon activating is nearly imperceptible. I’m not sure if using a fraction of one second is valid in this shell, it may have been ignoring it, but it proved my point.

However what I’ve done to this script and the way in which SDR-Console works I’m not convinced will work 100% of the time. The other problem is any changes that are made to these script files are not permanent they are only kept in RAM, so as soon as you reboot they revert to those stored in volatile memory (flash).

So it looks like I may have to reverse engineer the “pluto.frm” file and see if I can hack together a better script to make this work how I want. At least I now know where the 3s delay has come from and that there are possibilities to fix it.

That however will have to wait until the next post.

Pluto PTT and PlutoDVB Firmware

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The next step in the process of using the ADALM Pluto is sorting out a press-to-talk output to drive the Pluto Charon. In this instance I’ve followed the tried and trodden path of adding a small transistor output to one of the GPIO pins and updating the firmware. There are some interesting articles on the ADI website that discuss how to do this via the FPGA, but I decided to learn to walk before I ran.

When I ordered my Pluto Charon kit I also purchased the separate PTT module which you can see here (click). This is very easy to install, just make sure you observe good ESD practices when you remove the Pluto from it’s case and handle it on the bench.

Here’s the photo’s of how I installed mine.

I decided to use a small two pin right angle KK 0.254″ molex connector for the PTT output, as I’d like the capability of unplugging Pluto and Charon boards for service/changes/updates etc.

Now for the hairy scary part of the process. On the Mini-kits website is a URL to some custom firmware written by Evariste F5OEO that can enable a PTT function on a GPIO pin. I was at first a little alarmed by the comment “for the brave”, but it turns out this firmware is part of the PlutoDVB project. You can find later software from 2022 on Christian F5UII’s website (click) and you’ll see some comments about fixing the PTT on the Pluto Rev D boards to work with the latest versions of SDR-Console. I have a Pluto Rev C, which is the same as the Pluto Rev D, so I had no choice but to use this newer firmware and work out what to download.

So after reading most of Christians Website I discovered I had to do two things. Firstly I had to swap from the official ADI Pluto v0.38 firmware to the custom PlutoDVB 3.0.3 firmware. Secondly patch the 3.0.3 firmware to account for the Rev D hardware. This wasn’t obvious where to start.

Below is a summary of the steps I used to swap the firmware.

  • Connected the Pluto to my PC, checked it had presented a removable drive
  • Download the firmware from Christian F5UII”s website, I used the PlutoDVB perseverance firmware 0303 (26.6M)
  • Extracted the pluto.frm from the downloaded zip and stored it on the Pluto removable drive created on my PC (don’t get confused or alarmed by the file name “patch.zip” as this is indeed the entire firmware)
  • Ejected the Pluto and waited for it to finish doing the upgrade and reboot, once done it reconnected to the PC
  • Used a web-browser to point to http://192.168.2.1/index.html, confirmed it presented the “Lets go to PlutoDVB” welcome screen, not the ADI reference material.
  • Then clicked on the “Lets go to PlutoDVB (USB connection)” button which launched into the system setup.php page
  • From the menu across the top, selected “System ” then “Maintenance” where I found the patching and upgrading firmware mechanism.
  • For my hardware (Rev C/D) I needed to download and apply the “Patch for PlutoSDR Rev. D hardware”
  • Applied the patch, saw that within the “Delete Patch” window the updated files were displayed once done
  • Success !

Now I could configure the PlutoDVB firmware to do what I wanted, which in my case was to use SDR-Console. So from the “system” menu at the top I clicked on the “Pass-through” option and hit apply. That should be all I needed to complete.

There is an error message displayed across the top of the screen about a datv text file not being present. If you enter your call-sign in the respective field on the setup page and your name in the DVB provider field, hit “apply settings” and this will create the right file and the error message disappears.

Once all of this was done, I was able to setup and configure SDR-Console and test that the PTT worked with a multi-meter. Below you can see SDR-Console listening on 23cm ready for me to hit the TX button. The Pluto is sitting right up against the PC, so I’m not surprised there are some birdies in the shack, I’ll only panic once the Pluto and Charon and boxed up together.

For my next trick I intend to hook this up to my CRO and see how long before or after the PTT line is asserted does RF appear at the transmit port. However that will have to wait for the next post.

Boxing a Pluto Charon – the Heatsink

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For the past couple of weeks I’ve been giving some thought as to how I’d box up the Mini-kits Pluto Charon. As with any problem the first step it to work out how I want to use it.

I’d like to be able to use the Pluto Charon both in the field and in the ham shack. The ADLAM Pluto connects to a PC via a micro USB and presents itself as a USB Ethernet device.

Further reading suggests that the ADLAM Pluto USB OTG port can host an external USB-Ethernet adapter or USB-WiFi adapter, making it possible to un-tether the Pluto from a PC or use standard IT infrastructure. In my situation an external Ethernet port is of interest, since I could easily build all of the Mini-Kits Pluto boards into their own enclosure and simply network them together and into the same PC without having to count on multiple USB ports. This again fits with my field and shack mode of operation.

The output power of the Mini-kits Pluto Charon, Pluto Styx and proposed Pluto Nix kit is in the region of one to two watts. This is more than enough transmit power to jump from hilltop to hilltop over quite a path with some antenna gain and short cables. If however you want to lift the antennas up to the top of mast, external in-line amplifiers up behind the antennas would be required to keep losses under control. If the external amplifiers also included a separate mast head amplifier, then losses of up to 6-8dB at any of these microwave frequencies could be accommodated without significantly impacting performance. I’ll be exploring this further once the first Pluto Charon kit is completed.

So, the first step of course is to get the Pluto Charon kit operational, to do that I needed to test it. The kit came with a small 40x40mm heatsink that I could attach to dissipate the heat from the final amplifier IC1. I mulled this over for a while before deciding I’d prefer to put a much larger heatsink on the top of a die cast box and mount the Pluto Charon to that. A good example of what I’m thinking is how I built my Rubidium reference (here). My main reasoning is I’d like to stabilise the heat within the die cast box so the Pluto does not need to work so hard on keeping the frequency stable. Did I mention the Rubidium reference, one would say this started these shenanigans.

To get the heat out of the Pluto Charon final amplifier the layout dictated a small copper block to be made. There are components on the top and bottom of this board, so one needs to pay attention to clearances etc. So it was off to see a good friend with a lathe ;thanks Peter it was a fun afternoon and some good machining Zen !

Tappy tap tap !
Finished Copper Block
Installed

It is no coincidence that the copper block is 10mm thick, this is perfect for three 10mm hexagonal spacers to be placed under the remaining three sides of the PCB for support.

The hole in the middle of the copper block is what transfers the heat from IC1, so this was tapped to accept a M3 hole. The PCB had a plated 2.5mm hole and was reamed out slightly to accept the larger M3 screw. The M3 screw used was tin plated copper, not tin plated steel/stainless which is a poor conductor of heat.

The remaining four holes in the PCB that hold the heatsink were left M2.5 and the holes through the copper block drilled 3mm for clearance. When this is attached to the heatsink, four M2.5 x16mm screws through these holes in the heatsink, washers and split washers will be used to sandwich the assembly and keep everything held tight.

So I don’t forget and for anyone following along at home I’ve included the drill pattern. This was the only information conspicuously absent from the assembly instructions. This drawing is drawn from the top of the PCB looking down. The hole in the middle of the heatsink is referenced from the center of the copper block. For some reason I can’t get LibreCAD to show a mark for the origin yet. I hate having to measure PCB’s to get hole locations, a combination of transfer punches, vernier calipers and gauge pins were used to establish and check that these locations were close enough.

Now it’s time to carry on with the Testing and Alignment of the Pluto Charon !

So after two years ?

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For quite some time I’ve been promising my eldest son his own bedroom. However like everything, this is somewhat complicated and has taken far longer than expected. To make this happen, I’ve had to make more shelving in the shed, move stuff stored in the garage out into the shed, clean out the garage and move my office, which was in the 3rd bedroom of the house out into the garage soon to become my new man-cave. I’ve felt like I’ve been playing musical chairs with storage boxes for quite some time. Then there is the time required to renovate said 3rd bedroom back into a teenagers retreat, so much work, so many weekends, I still hate painting.

However, while moving things out of the office and into the new man-cave I rediscovered the Pluto Charon kit, languishing in a forgotten project box. My original plan was to use this kit as my 23cm home station, however during the above renovations a member of my radio club offered me a pristine Icom IC-910H with 23cm module which I couldn’t refuse. Needless to say the Pluto Charon priority and urgency was pushed back somewhat.

Fast forward two years and having rediscovering this kit, along with seeing the new 12cm Pluto Styx kit available (click) and a teaser for the 6cm Pluto Nix, well it was time to finish it and continue working my way up through the microwave bands.

BGU8051 are small

This kit requires the usual SMD microwave construction techniques, so fine solder a good iron, a steady hand and optical magnification is an absolute must. The Mini-kits instructions and support page are as usual first class. However one should heed the warning on the website ordering page that “this kit is not for beginners and requires very experienced soldering skills”.

I generally found the majority of the kit straightforward, until I got to IC5 which is a BGU8051 preamp from NXP. You should check out it’s specs on the NXP website. This is one of those “looks big on the computer screen” kind of parts that even designers get caught out with when ordering their first samples. I’ve included a photo, along with a strategically placed steel ruler for scale. That IC is tiny… really tiny !!!

At just two by two by three-quarters of a millimeter with eight pins, it was clear that this was not going to be soldered by any ordinary soldering iron. Thankfully I have a hot-air rework station, so I manually pasted the board with an I-Extruder, used plenty of flux and re-flow soldered the device to the board. Since inductor L7, capacitor C30 and resistor X3 were so close, I chose to leave these off until I had soldered IC5 to give me room and ensure the hot air did not cause unnecessary stress to adjacent components, YMMV. I also typically use a T3 solder paste for the majority of my kit building, but for this board I resorted to using T4 since you could nearly count the number of solder balls dispensed onto each pad of IC5. However I’m happy with the result and with the right tools this kit can be assembled at home. There are many YouTube tutorials on how to solder with hot-air worth watching as well.

Once I had the kit soldered together I then turned my attention to how I was going to put it in a box and begin to test it. However that is for the next post !

How do you get on 23cm ?!?

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I was recently looking at getting some radio gear that would get me up onto the Australian 23cm Amateur Radio Band. My first thoughts was to find some second hand commercial amateur gear, but this was soon dashed when 20 year old radios on eBay were fetching more than A$1000 in less than pristine condition. They are hard to find !

My second thought was of course a transverter. Where I would take one of my 2m or 70cm transceivers and “up-convert” the output onto the 23cm band. This is usually done by a combination of loads, mixers, fixed oscillators and amplifiers that you buy assembled or as a kit. Since I wanted to do both FM and SSB this presented something of a problem as the receive transmit frequency split for Australian 23cm repeaters is +20MHz. This means the radio attached to the transverter IF port has to be capable of wide band receive, which is not very common. So my calculator again suggested after I’d built a transverter, added a dedicated IF radio I’d be somewhere northwards of A$750… sigh that second hand commercial radio looked good again.

One of my local radio club members then introduced me to the Analog devices ADALM-Pluto SDR and the Pluto Charon 23cm module from Minikits here in Adelaide. I was hooked and two new toys were duly ordered and shipped. The cost of both the ADALM Pluto and Charon 23cm module was less than A$450 delivered but I did have to do a little shopping around to get the Pluto at a good price.

I then started researching what exactly you can do with one of these little devices and what exactly I’d just bought. I’m simply amazed at what Analog Devices have stuffed into this little box, better yet I’d received one of the Rev D platforms which has all the bells and whistles. As I discover things about the Pluto, I’m sure to blog them here soon.

I was again pleased to find the ADALM-Pluto was already supported by SDR-Console written by Simon Brown G4ELI. I’ve used SDR Console for many years in all of my HF contesting stations to display waterfall information. Using it for transmit was going to be a new experience.

Now to wait for that postman !