Original 1990s Stephen Moss Veronica Band 3 link boxes and main TX

[Frequent Lee]

Old Dream FM Leeds system dug out of the loft. Will get some internal photos to upload soon. I think the Band 3 link was 4 watts, original stereo limiter and encoder with main link receiver box and TX remote carrier detect power on switching.

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[radium98]

thanks you , we wait more pics

[radium98]

RX inside please with more details

[Frequent Lee]

Internals of VFO 70 watt, Band 3 201mhz link tx and rx, stereo limiter and stereo encoder combi.

[radium98]

Frequent Lee thank you very much . Keep the good things .

[BriansBrain]

Fantastic

Great pics

[shorty]

Have you tried out the band 3 link transmitter with the stereo encoder, i know in the early 90's stephen did some of the link transmitters with the sub carrier of the stereo encoder moved further up to carry the audio feed and on the lower carrier had a white noise generator to try and hide the link frequency.

[tvtv]

And when you turned off the link it would turn off the tx ?

[Frequent Lee]

Have you tried out the band 3 link transmitter with the stereo encoder, i know in the early 90's stephen did some of the link transmitters with the sub carrier of the stereo encoder moved further up to carry the audio feed and on the lower carrier had a white noise generator to try and hide the link frequency.

This is just a standard stereo encoder limiter and standard band 3 link set. I remember the white noise encoded links, they were only available in mono as far as I recall. Whilst the idea was good, in practice it didn't really hide anything except being able to tell whos studio link it was when you listened in on a scanner.

[Frequent Lee]

And when you turned off the link it would turn off the tx ?

Yes these have the relay in connected to the signal meter output on the ic when it detected the carrier it would power the main transmitter on.

[radium98]

nice infos

[rigmo]

Hi. any documentation?

[Frequent Lee]

Hi. any documentation?

They never came with documentation, they were just intended as plug and play for pirate radio stations.

[Albert H]

The IF he used in the receiver was the kit job from "Ambit" (remember them?). I used those for a while, because you could get a box of 30 kits for around £3 each, which was a cheap option at the time. My usual link receiver at the time was a dual-conversion type, using a Philips TV tuner module for the front end, taking the 35 MHz IF from that and mixing it with a crystal oscillator to give 10.7 MHz. The TV module would tune from ~45 MHz to ~1 GHz in three (four?) bands, so it made for a "one size fits all" solution. The tuner modules came from TV parts shops like Sendz in Shoeburyness or Manor Supplies in West End Lane. Of course I used ordinary TV aerials for the link receive.

The link transmitters were usually under a watt output, but with a 75Ω output match to allow the use of 75Ω TV coax and TV Band Yagi aerials (I used to use the "Antiference" ones from B&Q). Even though the links were low powered, the useful range could be several miles - the gain of those 24-element TV aerials was spectacular!

[Shedbuilt]

I built one or two Rxs with the Ambit / Cirkit IF kit; then imported it into a Rx PCB, with full ground plane and on board carrier switched relay.

I’d date the Stephen Miss kit as ‘93 or after. At one time, I had, in my possession, a similar setup. Veronica (original Stephen Moss Veronica), Band III link Tx and Rx, with a 10W PLL Band II rig. That had been bought somewhere around August or September’92, and used his older front end (ie single ended oscillator, buffer, multipliers. I saw another he’d supplied about six months later, and by then, he’d gone over to the push-pull / push-push oscillator / doubler. The older kit, also had an all analogue stereo encoder.

[radium98]

Shedbuilt if you can post some picture to get inspired

[Albert H]

For a short wile in 1989-1992, Stephen used my ancient stereo coder circuit that used a 19 kHz sinewave oscillator, a doubler circuit to give the 38 kHz subcarrier, a double-balanced mixer to generate the DSSC "S" signal, and a simple transistor-based matrixing circuit to develop Sum and Difference components.

As a simple all-analogue stereo coder, it worked remarkably well, and it was possible to tweak the relative levels of the "M", "S" and pilot signals very accurately. The 19kHz oscillator used silvered mica capacitors for frequency stability, and the whole 19 kHz oscillator (and its buffer) were secured with wax to keep everything accurately in place. The oscillator - if built with the specified components and run from an accurately regulated supply rail - was stable over ~30°C to within 5 Hz!

The problem with that coder was that it was a complete pain to get hold of exactly the right components, and it was relatively expensive and time-consuming to build and align. In 1992, Stephen tried out a couple of the Elektor switching stereo coders (and rejected them as "not good enough"), and then came up with his simple crystal-controlled 4-chip coder. In 1999, I added the refinements to it that ensured that the inputs could be labelled "Left" and Right" (it used to start up at random before that) and added the Mono / Stereo switching and indication.

The only problem with that little 4-chip coder was that the output wasn't quite as clean as we'd like, but considering just how simple it was, it worked really well!

[Frequent Lee]

I built one or two Rxs with the Ambit / Cirkit IF kit; then imported it into a Rx PCB, with full ground plane and on board carrier switched relay.

I’d date the Stephen Miss kit as ‘93 or after. At one time, I had, in my possession, a similar setup. Veronica (original Stephen Moss Veronica), Band III link Tx and Rx, with a 10W PLL Band II rig. That had been bought somewhere around August or September’92, and used his older front end (ie single ended oscillator, buffer, multipliers. I saw another he’d supplied about six months later, and by then, he’d gone over to the push-pull / push-push oscillator / doubler. The older kit, also had an all analogue stereo encoder.

Yeah these are from the summer of 1994 but we're never used, just kept as spares.

[Frequent Lee]

I built one or two Rxs with the Ambit / Cirkit IF kit; then imported it into a Rx PCB, with full ground plane and on board carrier switched relay.

I’d date the Stephen Miss kit as ‘93 or after. At one time, I had, in my possession, a similar setup. Veronica (original Stephen Moss Veronica), Band III link Tx and Rx, with a 10W PLL Band II rig. That had been bought somewhere around August or September’92, and used his older front end (ie single ended oscillator, buffer, multipliers. I saw another he’d supplied about six months later, and by then, he’d gone over to the push-pull / push-push oscillator / doubler. The older kit, also had an all analogue stereo encoder.

Yeah these are from the summer of 1994 but we're never used, just kept as spares.

[shorty]

Before this link receiver set up early 90's, Stephen used an FM Receiver sold by Tandy that he would modify for band 1 & 3 links, it was the one with would effect case, silver effect front, dial type knob, i know he also did some links very close to the airband, i always thought that these were a bit dodgy that may draw unwanted attention.