• Driver board kit on eBay

Posted: **Sun Jan 26, 2020 10:46 pm**

Hello everyone
I spied this on fleabay the other day:
https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre ... 4047059493
It says 850mw to 1 watt and the analyser pic suggests the harmonics are in the grass??Has anyone tried these before?Its listed by nrg-electronics.

Posted: **Mon Jan 27, 2020 1:35 am**

Spot the type 2 ferrite ring in the bag of bits. It's not going to pass much RF at 100 MHz if you make a transformer with that!
The analyser picture looks bogus - all that's being shown is a somewhat wide carrier!
Whoever "designed" this effort has got a 3.2MHz crystal for the PLL IC (probably a TSA5511) and a different crystal for the PIC - completely unnecessary, if you know what you're doing.
It's going to be an "at frequency" circuit, so the VCO will be susceptible to RF feedback problems.
There will be spurs at 3.2 MHz and 4 MHz away from the carrier because there's no effort to screen the logic from the RF.
There's probably about £6 of parts there. The price is ridiculous. £15 - 20 would be more realistic.

Posted: **Mon Jan 27, 2020 7:40 am**

Albert H wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 1:35 am [*]The analyser picture looks bogus - all that's being shown is a somewhat wide carrier! Haha thought so that’s why I said ‘suggests’.

Posted: **Mon Jan 27, 2020 9:15 am**

It's a copy of my old driverboard and is working good!
The Ferrite is a T37-2 and also used in the BW driverboard (most of the shematic is from BW)
The Pll is not giving spurs from the Xtal 0n 4.0 and 3.2MHz

Posted: **Mon Jan 27, 2020 11:01 am**

I think they are made by PCB_Wizard but now only sold in kit form to a small carefully selected few.

...As RF-HEAD says they are based on the old BW PLL design and work well, but instead they have got the push button tuning.

I've used a couple of these in the past without any issues and we made sure we cheecked them on the Analyser first and they were fine.

Posted: **Mon Jan 27, 2020 11:59 am**

This one needs some TLC

20200127_114014.jpg

Posted: **Mon Jan 27, 2020 12:57 pm**

It’s being sold by NRG.

Posted: **Mon Jan 27, 2020 7:29 pm**

is the pic of BW code protected ? or can i dump the hex file ? from inside

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2020 1:17 am**

XXL wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 12:57 pm It’s being sold by NRG.

No it's not. It's some bogus "NRG" username that's been put up on Ebay. NRG in the UK doesn't exist any more. The stock and intellectual property was sold to a guy in New Zealand - NRG-NZ.

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2020 1:18 am**

radium98 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 7:29 pm is the pic of BW code protected ? or can i dump the hex file ? from inside

Don't bother. They used the MC145170 PLL IC that's VERY difficult to find these days.

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2020 1:34 am**

RF-Head wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 9:15 am It's a copy of my old driverboard and is working good!
The Ferrite is a T37-2 and also used in the BW driverboard (most of the shematic is from BW)
The Pll is not giving spurs from the Xtal 0n 4.0 and 3.2MHz

The ferrite should be a blue and yellow T37-17 for the transformer to work properly. If it's based on the BW board, there will be spurs from the crystal(s) since the board layout is so poor. Also, the BW board would only achieve a Watt with 16V supply, and wouldn't lock above 102 MHz unless the supply was raised as well. They also suffered really badly from RF feedback problems, leading to hum on the carrier.

I'll put a schematic and a layout for a good quality exciter up here in the next few days. It's a doubler- based circuit, and delivers a full Watt. It has just five adjustments to align it, and is clean enough for connection directly to an aerial. I have one running here most of the time to provide a source for testing RBR setups and to give us something worthwhile to listen to. The board includes screens to prevent the digits getting into the RF, and it's designed to be fitted into a standard small diecast box. The last ones we made of these (a batch of 80) went to a cable TV company for head-end RF sources for FM radio on their cable network. They use only through-hole components since they were going to be kits originally!

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2020 1:45 pm**

How do you change the hex on the mc145170 ? I been looking everywhere for software to do it. I can’t code for shit.

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2020 4:39 pm**

THE GOVERNOR wrote:This one needs some TLC
20200127_114014.jpg

Just need to plug in your lcd into that thing. I think they was called bwpll+ back in the day geez had one of them back in 2004 I think lol memory lost lol

Sent from my AMN-LX9 using Tapatalk

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2020 4:45 pm**

Electronically wrote:
THE GOVERNOR wrote:This one needs some TLC
20200127_114014.jpg
Just need to plug in your lcd into that thing. I think they was called bwpll+ back in the day geez had one of them back in 2004 I think lol memory lost lol

Sent from my AMN-LX9 using Tapatalk

2001 I think I had it lol.

Sent from my AMN-LX9 using Tapatalk

Posted: **Tue Jan 28, 2020 6:45 pm**

from 2000 ,i have mine had a stroke and one is working with clean 1 w no tune so why i ask if i can guet the firmware from the other
anyway i post the manual

Posted: **Tue Feb 04, 2020 7:19 pm**

I've got one of these, also from eBay, so I thought I'd stick it on the analyser as I couldn't remember what it looked like.

PCB - Copy.JPG

It's not too bad:

1GHz span - Copy.JPG

It's tuned to 87.5 MHz. The analyser says 86 MHz due to the large span relative to the narrow peak.

87.5 MHz:

875 - Copy.JPG

98 MHz:

98 - Copy.JPG

108 MHz:

108 - Copy.JPG

Span reduced to 20 MHz. Marker placed at 4 MHz for Albert, could have been placed at 6.4 I suppose (which is what the crystal is) but I didn't.

4MHz out - Copy.JPG

The numbers:
I'm using a 20 dB attenuator, so all of the reference level numbers are actually 20 dB down.
87.5: 8.2 dBm + 20 = 0.661W, harmonics -49.85 dBc
98: 6.8 dBm + 20 = 0.479W, harmonics -49.28 dBc
108: 5.1 dBm + 20 = 0.324W, harmonics -48.79 dBc

I haven't tried tuning it for more power because I've lost my plastic hex key set. When I find it, I will see if I can tune it up for more power.

Posted: **Wed Feb 05, 2020 1:24 am**

Pranker:

If you replaced the 3866 with a 4427 you'd get a fair bit more power - probably towards a Watt. You might need a bigger heatsink for the final!

That board looks like it's pretty clean - it looks like a Roger board, but he didn't use the 5511 AFAIK.

Driver board kit on eBay

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