I needed a good laugh.....

[Shedbuilt]

Hey Shedbuilt - you're right! I missed the quotation marks around "designed".

Incidentally - have you noticed that Hollings' rip-off of Stephen's oscillator is fundamentally crippled? It can't ever work as designed (when Stephen came up with the circuit back in the late 70s). The whole principle of the "self-doubling push-push oscillator" is that it MUST be truly balanced, The coils must be identical, the oscillator transistors must have the salme Hfe and Vcesat, and the loading on the oscillator must be symmetrical.

The brain-dead copier - Paul "I'll sue you" Hollings - doesn't understand the first thing about the circuits he ripped off from Stephen. He's tried to "simplify" the circuit by removing the balancing load components from one side of the oscillator. He's also "cut down" on the "unnecessary" decoupling and filtering components. He's also run the driver and output stages into saturation to make it appear to be "broadband". What he's done is turn a piece of brilliant 1980s design into a complete turd. The crap that this board puts out cannot be filtered to cleanliness!

Absolutely Albert. I noticed the omission of the mirrored / idler buffer. Also noticed - if I remember rightly, that Stephen's under-decoupled emitter - in the driver stage, became fully decoupled; negating more of the original design. Someone who understood the original design, wouldn't have done this. What came out of this, was coupled straight into the final, which added the saturation you mentioned, to the tale of woe.

[RF-Head]

Lol found this also on the web

Dear xxxxxxxx,

I am replying on my PDA from home as it is a national holiday today. Due to this I cannot retreive the images you attached until I get into work. I do have a copy of the PLL6 circuit layout and diagram with me at home.

The postions C17, C15, R23, R25, this is gonna be long, I hope you don't mind. We have recently been working on a mod for the PLL6 for shutting the power off in an out of lock condition. To meet the ETS european spec the power has to be reduced by at least 50dB below full carrier. We tried various ways of doing this, the obvious were killing the DC to the final PA, same to the 100mW driver, but we were lucky to get 40dB of suppression. The only way we could get greater than 50dB was to make a hard short circuit to ground at the base of the TR4 driver transistor, this gave an impressive 60 to 70dB of carrier supression. We used a BF494 npn transistor with collector connected to TR4 base and emitter to ground. By applying a small amount of current to the BF494 base it suppressed the RF carrier beautifully. We then took a voltage from the lock indicator circuitry to drive the BF494, so it would shut down automatically in the out of lock condition. One problem, when in shutdown it loaded the oscillator too heavily which in turn pulled it off frequency, when it locked and tried to power back up the oscillator was again unloaded. This abrupt change from loaded to unloaded pulled the frequency again and caused it to jump out of lock. This in turn shut it down again, it tried to lock again and then shut down agaih and the cycle continued. We tried some snubber circuits to stop this hunting going on which helped a little, but were not good enough. We figured the next option to try was increasing the loop gain. We removed C17 and C15 to achieve this and connected the varicap directly to the LC tank with the 0R resistors. This increased the pull in range of the PLL and the out of lock circuit now worked correctly. C15 and C17 were originally there to limit the loop effectiveness in order to keep the loop noise down on the audio. The mod did not noticably increase the noise significantly.

We decided to apply the mod to the assembled PLL6 as we test these in our workshop and could check that it could be repeated over and over again without any problems. Until we have verified a mod on many assembled units we do not apply it to the kit version.

I will try your 10uF mod to the 11V DC supply, thank for that, it is appreciated.

It's a pleasure to talk with someone who understands and has an interest in these type of circuits, it is only on rare occasions this happens.

Hope this helps.

Paul Hollings.




-----Original Message-----
From: "[email protected]"
Sent: 20/03/08 16:28:23
To: "info@a****f.com"
Subject: Veronica EasyTune PLL6

Ladies and gentlemen,

shortly i bought a EasyTune PLL6 1Watt Exiter fully assembled 1W PLL and Stereocoder directly from your company.

Now i have a technical question :

I found out that in my assembly C15/R23 and C17/R25 and C27 are missing.
C4 had 1,8pF instead of 15pF. So i found C71 and C4 both 1,8pF.
Instead of C15/R23 was a link resistor soldered and the same was at
the position of C17/R25. Look at the attached foto of my device.
My device is different to the circuit diagram at the yellow marked positions.

Now it would be interesting for me to know what was the intention of this modifications in your assembly.

Furthermore i want to inform you about a improving modification which i made in the circuit.
Analyzing the unmodulatated mono carrier with an audio analyzer, i found
a 12,5 khz tone 10dB over the noise level. Monitoring the exiters signal on a FM-Receiver with headphones, this 12,5 khz tone was very disturbing.

I found out that this disturbing noise came from the IC3 in the PLL.
I could eleminate the 12,5khz tone by attaching an 10uF Elko parallel to ZD3/C63. This gives better filtering of the 11Volt.
After adding this Elko the carrier was clean of disturbing noise from the ICs.

I expect your technician`s answer

regards

xxxxxx xxxxxx

xxxxxx / Germany

[Analyser]

Now, that's is funny!

[yellowbeard]

He is crowdsourcing his engineering talent so, by slagging him off you may be actually helping him out. Ha!

[MiXiN]

He is crowdsourcing his engineering talent so, by slagging him off you may be actually helping him out. Ha!

It doesn't matter, because if anyone puts "a****f" into Google search - Radionecks is right up there and every reply on here apart from the odd one says the stuff is shit.

You've just got to look at his eBay feedback to see that hardly anyone buys his overpriced gear which is great to see.

Why is his company name being censored by the way?

[Albert H]

Paul Hollings was an inept salesman, abysmal club DJ, and doesn't have the slightest clue about RF engineering. The first time I met him I marked him down as a clueless twat, and subsequent events proved that I was completely right.

He plundered Stephen's designs, and then claimed that they were his own (despite not being able to explain how they worked when questioned - more on that in a moment). He then tried to sue Stephen Moss to prevent him using his own designs. In fact, he wanted Stephen out of business altogether and tried to serve an injunction against him trading!

Stephen and Christine just changed the name of their company - which cost them £50. Hollings had to pay almost £3000 to generate the frustrated injunction - served against the company, not the people - so it failed. He then tried to sue his brief for the bad advice he was given (I'd taken the brief out for a couple of drinks the night before the injunction was served, so I knew that it would fail!).

Way back, when Stephen first knew him, Hollings was interviewed at the BBC for a low-level technician job. He proudly displayed some of "his" work, and the panel asked him to describe the operation of various parts of the circuits he'd brought with him. He didn't have the slightest clue how any of it worked. One member of the panel drew a simple C-R filter on a pad and asked him to describe its operation. He blustered and mumbled and simply didn't have any idea how to calculate turnover frequency, time constant, or anything else - he couldn't even say whether it would be highpass or lowpass! They told him that he obviously hadn't listened at school and that there was no place for him at the BBC.

Eventually, a legal agreement was drawn up which gave the discredited "Veronica" name to Hollings and allowed Stephen to continue in business as long as his products were "substantially different" to those of Hollings.

Stephen and I set to work, and I added a handful of components to his cheap stereo coder to give it proper mono / stereo switching and to guarantee which input would be left and which would be right - the original circuit started up at random! I added the out-of-lock power-down circuit to the PLL Pro III and suggested the use of the 74HC4059 to replace the three ICs that were used before. This also gave the option of BCD rotary switches for frequency selection.

I contributed the Pro IV stereo coder and set about designing a PWM limiter to go with it. The coder was a great success, and I've seen it used all over the world - many station engineers reckon that it's the best basic stereo coder that they've ever used!

In the meantime, Stephen worked on the amplifier strip for the Pro III and came up with the 4427 into the 1947, giving as much as 5 Watts without any need to adjust. I also experimented with a 2SC2166, which - if configured for broadband - would give about 50 Watts for 4½ Watts in. The down side to this device was that it needed 28V - not convenient for the products that Stephen proposed.

I built a BLW60C PA - 7 Watts in for 45 Watts out at 12V. With some tweaking and a few minor component changes, we made a PA that worked well with the Pro III. 4 Watts in gave 40 Watts out every time, and there was no combination of settings of the two trimmers that could ever make it unstable. Stephen and I added the low-power switch to the Pro III, and were delighted to discover that the PA would deliver around 15W with the exciter on "low". The PA was subsequently sold as a 15 / 40 Watt unit.

We also tried a pair of BLW60s and got about 90W out for 10W drive. However, the current draw was insane and the heat was massive. We also would have to use expensive output trimmers, so that idea was dropped.

I built a BLF177 PA, and found that the Pro III needed to be attenuated! I needed 2.5 Watts for 160W out, so had to use a resistive pad to lose a bit of the power. When Stephen sold 150W (or 300W dual jobs), he modified the supply dropper resistor on the Pro III board to get exactly the right amount of drive.

Hollings by this time had suffered his run-in with the ex-squaddies and had run away to the Dominican Republic!

To sum up - Hollings, under either company name, has never produced anything that worked properly as advertised. He hasn't the slightest clue - still - about RF engineering, and still tries to bamboozle the gullible with bluster. As Bugs Bunny would say: "What a Maroon!"

[sde-1104]

He is crowdsourcing his engineering talent so, by slagging him off you may be actually helping him out. Ha!

It doesn't matter, because if anyone puts "a****f" into Google search - Radionecks is right up there and every reply on here apart from the odd one says the stuff is shit.

You've just got to look at his eBay feedback to see that hardly anyone buys his overpriced gear which is great to see.

Why is his company name being censored by the way?

To stop it showing up in Google search.. long story

[Banus_radio]

As it happens I ordered a stereo encoder off his ebay site last year. I cant remember which, but one of the channels badly crosstalks to the opposite channel, even at very low mod you can hear it breaking through. We tried it on air for about a day and took it off. Its not because ive set it up incorrectly either. even with a really low mod going into and with the output and pilot turned up just until the stereo light would appear it would still crosstalk. I also remember a lot of background noise from the ic's. I tried replacing all of the ic's which got ridof the background noise but there was still the crosstalk issue. Still it was only £25 odd pound so not the end of the world

[Albert H]

If you need a cheap, simple and easy to build stereo coder that works well (and the only tricky to get component is the crystal), then I'll put it up in another thread. There's also a work-around for the unusual crystal, too. If you build it carefully, using the recommended parts, you can build a really good coder for <£15.

[Banus_radio]

yes please albert... 100% would love to build that. ill buy you a beer

[Albert H]

I'll start another thread for the stereo coder. I might also throw in a nice audio limiter. A friend of mine over in Reading may be doing kits for these in the near future - I'll let you know if that happens.

[pirateaddict]

Or8 Albert.. Kits you say..I'll keep an eye out for these..Top man!

[Banus_radio]

Yes a limiter circuit would be wicked albert. Funny enough I bought one on ebay last week, it was a mono design and to be fair it sounds excellant for the £13 steal I paid, was a little slow on postage as took almost a a week to receive. Its the green pcb with the red led, looks very simple to make. I may try and copy it and post a circuit up here myself. ebay item# 182365803223

[mike123]

I have tried a Pcbwizard limiter with item number 112213807503.
Was hoping it would be nice, but I'm not satisfied.

1. It has a slooow release time (nothing to tweak)
2. no indication if it is limiting
3. and I hear some audio distortion (at the moment the audio signal is "recovering" and it receives audio again).
It reminds me of the old cassette deck limiters.

[RF-Head]

Correct
it's using the same chip

[nrgkits.nz]

Here's a 30w amp I bought many years back when I was first getting into this kind of thing, unfortunately I had no idea about Paul back then.

The power pack provided with the amp had the same physical size and look as a laptop power pack, and gave 13.8v 4amps. Needless to say it got very hot! I ended up using the 12v output from a computer PSU instead as they are high current, the amp ran at a few watts of reduced output given the lower voltage.

Most if not all of Paul's gear seems to have some or all of the coils in a straight line, like in this one. They should be at right angles to each other to help prevent inductive coupling between them. There's lots of information found in Google about good PA design and Paul seems to be oblivious to this, or such simple errors wouldn't exist in his gear.

IMG_2129.JPG

[Maximus]

Thanks for the clear pic. I've just noticed the wires going to the ant socket. I'm not sure if it'll make much difference at that length but it's definitely not good practice


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[nrgkits.nz]

I may end up pulling this one apart, the final, heatsink and trimmers will come in handy elsewhere. Its very inefficient the amount of power it draws, needs a decent size power supply. I did test it on the analyzer some time ago and surprisingly enough it did appear clean, (might have been because I used a nrg to drive it) although it was only a quick test with default settings and I didn't look any further than about -50dBc. I'll test it again and use a much lower resolution bandwidth, plus i'll adjust the factory set trimmers and see what we get. I'll post the results here.

[radio-berlin]

I've just seen a****f have a special offer for their 1w exciter and stereo coder in a bundle. Only problem is that it's £30 more expensive than buying them separate.

[MiXiN]

I've just seen a****f have a special offer for their 1w exciter and stereo coder in a bundle. Only problem is that it's £30 more expensive than buying them separate.

I've just been on eBay & noticed that, and I notice somebody has fallen for it as he's sold one recently. Doh.

Unless people are buying from his actual website, his eBay feedback suggests he's only sold an handful of stuff in the past 12 months - so I wonder if he's actually earning more than a pittance?

Most of his eBay feedback consists of buying from China.