Monday 28 March 2016

Noise Problems on Transmit



I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to track down the source of a buzzing noise on the Tx signal as heard in a receiver across the shack.  I’ve put caps just about everywhere that I could think of, although I did not put in place several at once.  I just added different values at certain locations. There is permanently installed caps on the power points for the dds and nano boards.  As well I moved, to a certain degree, boards around to see if I could detect any variances in the signal but again no differences were noticed.

The next step in my quest, was to remove the cable for the LO signal that is being supplied by the Si5351 board. I substituted in a signal generator at the IF frequency of 4.9152mhz and injected the signal a 2 locations. The first one was to input the signal into the IF crystal filter and the result was a clean signal.  Next I injected the signal into the LO of the mixer and a clean signal was heard there as well. As the signal at this point was about 100mv, and the output of the dds is around 4vpp, I increased the voltage to check if that was an issue.  The signal was still clean at that level as well.
So I’m fairly confident that the problem exists with the dds. Now how to figure out how to clean that up.  Especially since the signal from the signal generator appears to be not that much different than what the dds was supplying.

73, Peter

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