A few more ideas, if you happen to be in the market. ?
Though this is a good example of why I seldom actually do anything,
it's so much fun to dream up possible embellishments before ever getting started.

Asking the si5351 to drive 50 ohm loads directly might overtax the single Vcc pin,
giving crosstalk between the three oscillators and thus birdies. ?
Could be that a three buffer amps of some sort are in order there. ?
Maybe use two si5351's (with an analog switch to select which one sees the I2C bus)?

Shielding parts of the rx front end from each other might also reduce birdies. ?
Perhaps use chunks of copper plumbing pipe standing upright on the groundplane,
four copper testpoints sticking up through the groundplane around the periphery of each pipe,
to be soldered to the copper pipe. ?A second pcb with just a solid ground plane
gets bolted over the top with appropriate rfi gasket material where it meets the copper pipe sections.

Add traces and holes for additional features, such as an ad8307 log amp
for use during debug or as an S-meter. ?AGC, over-temp protection in the final.
?
Does operation at 10 meters require more gain on rx?

Solid state TR switching. ?Not being a mechanical engineer, I view relays with suspicion.?

I'll be interested in such a board, Rahul! In fact that seems like a kit type that I'd love overall. I am wanting to build a DDS controlled general coverage receiver as a project, and this would be a great way to do it without having to worry about layout on a Manhattan style build.?
--
Ryan Flowers - W7RLF

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The initial Raduino?software effort basically works!? ?

Using the bitx40 Raduino, I can fully tune (one any one band) the Heathkit SB-100 vacuum tube radio now.? ?In order to change to a different band you do two things:

1)? change the physical bandswitch of the Heathkit (which brings in different tuned circuits, & heterodyne crystals)

2)? turn the raduino freq control full to the direction desired -- I have it written so it speeds through jumping QUICKLY?until it hits a valid HAM BAND and then it moves through at a sedate pace of jumps so you can stop close to where you want --- the code then automatically utilizes the correct heterodyne oscillator and bfo oscillator crystal frequencies for the Heathkit and provide the correct VFO frequency to put the rig where you wanted it.??

[For one band and for the? usb/lsb? BFO's we have already measured those cyrstals and on that band it is pretty perfect....will measure all the other crystals tomorrow after some sleep so it becomes near perfect there also. ]

And the code retains the minimalist FT857d computer-controllable features meaning software like WINLINK EXPRESS or WINLINK RMS TRIMODE can drive the rig (within one portion of a band) to any frequency needed.? ?That feature is important to allow the auto-RF-forwarding of WINLINK to function in the event of massive Internet Failure --- remember,this project was one palliative measure in the event of EMP.? ?

I am so appreciative of everything that Allard -- and Pavel --- wrote which I've utilized.? ?The top disclaimer in the code from Allard remains intact, and although I basically had to start fresh to do the FT857d emulation, I will add some statement of how much Pavel's code made it possible.??

It has been a good day.

Gordon?

I compressed the picture attached to the first post down to almost nothing to save bandwidth.? I didn't realize how bad it was.? The actual bezel is silky smooth and straight.

In the process of refitting lunchbox (my BITX40 lived in Farhan's plastic lunchbox shipping container so long I've taken to calling it lunchbox) to my fancy new ?I needed a bezel for the Raduino.? I would imagine with proper tools you could fit the LCD without a bezel but in my haste I was about as elegant as a monkey trying to crack a coconut.? I drew up a bezel that properly hides my hacking.? It just about tension holds the LCD but just to be sure I used at ton of hot glue to hold the bezel to the case and the LCD not to mention hold my fingers together and the glue gun to my bench.? I've uploaded the .stl to the files section in case (pun fully intended) anyone else can use it.



I was going to use W8TEE's TFT VFO but I scavenged the TFT, AD9850 and Arduino to build his Antenna Analyzer because I'm cheap like that.

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The completed exciter board is stable and runs for hours with minimal drift but the VFO runs wild when its mounted on the base of the steel box that would be its home. Not using an FLL and hoping to keep it that way.?Tried the usual solid RF grounding approaches on all panels and exciter PCB ground plane but no luck so far. No PA connected as yet. Exciter is mounted on grounded 3/8" standoffs. Any thoughts ? 73 Paul ZS2OE

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Thanks for the Kudos Gordon.

I'm really on standby now with a huge work load, but I'm ready to help Allard in the version 2.0 of the bix40 code for the raduino or even Farhan with the new multiband bitx, I'm very glad to contribute to the ham community and participate in the creation of great things together.

PS: have you see this video? () It's a pro Linux TED conference, but the concept of the free forming communities & exchange of ideas in them is the core in which the bitx software project has flourished. it's definitely a must see one...

YES PAVEL --- I studied your code very carefully and it was the driving force to help me get going what I wanted to do!!!!  HUGE HELP and I heartily appreciate and support what you seem to be working on!!!!    Your work was priceless to me.

You are welcomed, don't hesitate to detect/report bugs, suggest/propose changes, ask question on how it works, etc...

I am doing only a fraction of what you have done!    I'm so ignorant that I had difficulty  getting your code integrated with what I already had with Allard's version 1.24.....so I had to just kinda write a little subroutine myself. 

The trick in the Allard's code is that he uses blocking delays here and there to support some functions and that's not compatible with my lib. To make Allard's bitx40 raduino code to work flawlessly with that lib, it need to be changed to a non blocking delays strategy.

See, the Arduino is a single thread MCU, when yo make a delay for 500 msecs it stay there doing nothing for +/- 500 msecs... and if in that time lapse a serial call came from the PC and the UART buffer get full, you may break the serial comms, then the software on the PC will tell you that the radio is not responding to commands.

Bottom line: it will fail at some point in the actual state of the code.

Simply changing every blocking delay to a non blocking one is doable and it will work (BTDT), but is not "nice" in programing/firmware-space terms, another strategy must be employed there, the 2.0 version must have that on mind.

 (I'm just a 62 year old doc with a past set of degrees in Electrical Engineering, so still learning all these complicated IDE type things......)     Took me 7 hours to make it all work.....I didn't understand the "packed binary coded decimal"  that is part of the FT857d frequency notation......

You will be surprised of how many "professionals" are really just dedicated people that took a passion as driving force.

I'm an Industrial Engineer that has become a System Administration on Linux and Open Source Software platforms (IT services, enterprise cloud services, etc...) and now a Consultant for government enterprises on that subject to migrate away from Microsoft solutions...

Also developing for CHIRP (), and other free projects. And two kids at home with 3 and 6 years each...

Here on the list you have a few other examples, you have Allard, Jack Purdum, Jerry Graffke, even Farham itself.

I didn't see a photo of whatever hardware you are working on --- can you show a photo somewhre?

We are using almost any hardware we can find,? we are mainly re-proposing some old radios from war/marine/commercial surplus as old as from the 70'

We are using bitxes to, I have a group of cuban hams that are using the arduino-arcs as a general purpose radio controller adapted to his hardware options, this is my beta-test group that brings me a steady feedback for improvements or fixes.

For example we have:

• CO8PHG with a hombrewed Bitx40.
• CO7LX with an adapted Spilbury HF tranceiver (former xtal channelized radio)
• CO7YB is working on modifying a FT-101 that he rescued from a junk yard (literally!)
• CO7KD is working with a FORUNO FS-1000 radio.
• CO7DS is modifying a FORUNO FS-1000 as per CO7KD instructions.
• etc.

To my count at least 10 to 15 of this radios are working with the sketch, the funny thing is that they are working with different arduinos (Uno, Mini, mini-pro, micro, Mega, etc) and that the reason you may see the sketch breaks it's features and you can enable/disable them on by one.

For example the full featured one will run on any ATMega 328 or 2560 MCU (Uno, Mega) but if all you have is a mini with a ATMega 168 (half the firmware space) you can leave out the Memory & CAT features an you are ready to rock.

I had a request even from a Argentinian? ham that uses the sketch for a headless solution (no LCD, no buttons, no rotary: just CAT control) and that's included too, and it fits on a ATMega8 MCU... yes... about 6k of size...

I personally had a through hole bitx hardware and a Uno, with a homebrewed "raduino" controller... now it's sleeping on the junk box due to a lighting strike on my shack that killed all the radios connected to antennas (Yes, I know, how in the world I may leave and let radios connected to antennas in a tropical island... in summer) Murphy has his ways... I lose a new acquired base 2m radio on that strike too :'(

That's why I have limited my contributions in recent times to only optimizations, and when some friend with a real raduino can test it for me... without a real hardware to test it's very difficult to get consistency.

That happened to me on my start on this group and some of my contributions failed because my (adapted) hardware has it's own troubles not related to the real raduinos.

Will Ashar Farhan's new multi-band bitx type transceiver help you?

Sure, I would love to had my hands on one of those to hack and improve... and contribute to its development.

The pictures are nice... kudos to the Farham team.

But here from Cuba is difficult, the actual raduino full kit price is about 1.5 month salary for me, paypal is a no go from here due to the American Blockade/Embargo, not to mention that the shipping of the kit is a madness with a jumpy custom and a bad (sad to say, but true) delivery rates of electronic goods. I have not tried DHL shipping to be fare on saying, just regular mail parcels.

My only 100 sure option is a friend/know person that travels to Cuba to bring me things that things; for example I won a contest for a Great Scott Gadgets for a HackRF One SDR Transceiver... it's sleeping on USA in a friends home to travel to Cuba for about a year or more... GGGGRRRR...

Several cuban hams use my WINLINK gateway station to get weather and other information, and I'm delighted to be of any help to our Cuban amateur radio operators.

About WINLINK, yes, I know a few cubans that use that platform, myself included ;)

Thanks !

THANKS!!!!!   You paved a broad brush that helped me very much....and I hope to see your work go far!!!

Thanks Gordon, don't hesitate to ask any thing you need/want to understand.

Gordon


________________________________________
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Pavel Milanes Costa <pavelmc@...>
Sent: Tuesday, December 5, 2017 5:22 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [BITX20] CAT control of the bitx frequency

El 05/12/17 a las 02:58, Gordon Gibby escribió:

I suspect that either someone has already done this, or many of you
could do it much faster than I, but I have managed now to make the
Raduino appear to be a Yaesu FT857d and respond to WINLINK frequency
commands on 80 and 40 meter bands, issued at 9600 baud 8N1 via the usb
port....

Have a look at this:



An application example here




Cheers.

--
73 CO7WT, Pavel.

-- 
73 CO7WT, Pavel.

The single band units are a joy to build and modify . Even works on 160 ! A big THANK YOU to Ashhar Farhan and the rest of the team for an outstanding job with this latest multiband update. You have added some extra Christmas cheer to hams around the world with this latest announcement . ubitx will be Ham Radio Fun for sure :)

Laurence ---

That would be the concern of course. EMP coming in from a large, broadband antenna tends to have a volttage maximum in the 5 kV range (bcause the coax basically ARCS above that) and kilo-amperes of instantaneous ( we're talking nanoseconds) current.

All of that assaults any stage connected directly to the antenna. The differential voltage/current is what comes in from center conductor to ground; the common mode voltage and current may also be huge.

By contrast, small pocket sized items such as pocket transistor radios, cell phones, etc --- WITH NO WIRES --- are virtually unaffected. (The cell tower they wish to use....not so much....)

So the issue is to make the connection between the very-tough-emp-unaffected vacuum tube rig and the very-flimsy-Raduino.....one that will not allow the Raduino to be damaged.

Here are some suggestions:
1. Raduino voltage output is maybe 2 V pk-pk. So add forward and backward sttring of 3-4 diodes to clip any differential voltage any higher than that.
Many a ham radio uses this exact technique to protect against high power transmitters nearby... These diodes should be right at the entrance of the cable to the Raduino, to a metallic case in which the Raduino exists.
2. Bandpass filter the signals going from the raduino to the rig. That might be as simple as a series capacitor (to stop very low frequencies) and a shunt capacitor to stop stuff well above 5 MHz (the ffrequency needed for the vacuum tube rig in this case).
3. balun type construction (wraps around a ferrite toroid, or lots of beads around the cable) to stop common mode currents


EMP is just an extremely strong, extremely broadband version of plain old Radio Frequency Interference. Hams are pretty used to dealing with RFI, this is just a lot bigger.


Gordon


________________________________________
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Laurence Oberman <oberman.l@...>
Sent: Tuesday, December 5, 2017 5:59 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [BITX20] Using Raduino for vacuum tube rig

Awesome message.
But surely the electronics in the Raduino generating the VFO frequency
needed is itself exposed to the same EMP issues you trying to get
around with for the Tube setup.
Perhaps I misunderstood though.

Regards
Laurence
KB1HKO


On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 4:33 PM, Gordon Gibby <ggibby@...> wrote:

The Raduino output was very successful at replacing the VFO of the heathkit
SB-100 that we are building as an EMP-proof system for our local Emergency
Operations Center. Receiver worked well and transmitter hit full power.
This rig, designed maybe 50 years ago, included provisions for an external
VFO in the range of 4.5 - 5 MHz. Jerry taught me a lot about how diode
mixers work, so now i much better understand WHY this works. The raduino
output appears close to the same level as the 50-year old vacuum tube VFO.


It is easy to measure the frequency of each of the heterodyne crystals, and
of the upper and lower sideband BFO cyrstals (it shifts the suppressed
carrier on opposite sides of the SSB filter) and write some code (thanks to
the ongoing education Allard is providing) and create a digital VFO that can
give the old vacuum tube 100-watt rig new life



The technology improvements and applications that y'all are making have far
reaching effects! Y'all should be very proud of yourselves!


Cheers,


gordon gibby

count me in for 2 :) I will even prepay Ashhar

Awesome message.
But surely the electronics in the Raduino generating the VFO frequency
needed is itself exposed to the same EMP issues you trying to get
around with for the Tube setup.
Perhaps I misunderstood though.

Regards
Laurence
KB1HKO

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Eval AD9910 boards are available on ebay for $61. ?Eventually they will be much cheaper, but its probably a good platform to design around starting now.?

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Yup -- a faraday cage (aka garbage can with tight fitting lid) is a wise plan for some gear.? ?Agreed!??

But my major goal is to take advantage of the knowledge so freely published by the ARRL in the early 80's and make emergency comms gear that is basicallly hardened or impervious to attack by nuts in north K or elsewhere.? ?THat reduces the benefit to them of any attack and might reduce their willingness to try it....

There is a book that has been helpful to me in knowing how to harden gear:

?

Be sure to wrap a spare Raduino up into a generous chunk of aluminum foil.
Maybe a Bitx too, while you're at it.

Then relax, drink a few beers, and google for "Weird Al Aluminum Foil"

Jerry, KE7ER

YES PAVEL --- I studied your code very carefully and it was the driving force to help me get going what I wanted to do!!!! HUGE HELP and I heartily appreciate and support what you seem to be working on!!!! Your work was priceless to me.

I am doing only a fraction of what you have done! I'm so ignorant that I had difficulty getting your code integrated with what I already had with Allard's version 1.24.....so I had to just kinda write a little subroutine myself. (I'm just a 62 year old doc with a past set of degrees in Electrical Engineering, so still learning all these complicated IDE type things......) Took me 7 hours to make it all work.....I didn't understand the "packed binary coded decimal" that is part of the FT857d frequency notation......

I didn't see a photo of whatever hardware you are working on --- can you show a photo somewhre? Will Ashar Farhan's new multi-band bitx type transceiver help you?

Several cuban hams use my WINLINK gateway station to get weather and other information, and I'm delighted to be of any help to our Cuban amateur radio operators.

THANKS!!!!! You paved a broad brush that helped me very much....and I hope to see your work go far!!!

Gordon


________________________________________
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Pavel Milanes Costa <pavelmc@...>
Sent: Tuesday, December 5, 2017 5:22 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [BITX20] CAT control of the bitx frequency

El 05/12/17 a las 02:58, Gordon Gibby escribió:

I suspect that either someone has already done this, or many of you
could do it much faster than I, but I have managed now to make the
Raduino appear to be a Yaesu FT857d and respond to WINLINK frequency
commands on 80 and 40 meter bands, issued at 9600 baud 8N1 via the usb
port....

Have a look at this:



An application example here




Cheers.

--
73 CO7WT, Pavel.

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Here is one I just built and I love it.?.
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El 05/12/17 a las 02:58, Gordon Gibby escribió:

I suspect that either someone has already done this, or many of you could do it much faster than I, but I have managed now to make the Raduino appear to be a Yaesu FT857d and respond to WINLINK frequency commands on 80 and 40 meter bands, issued at 9600 baud 8N1 via the usb port....

Have a look at this:



An application example here




Cheers.

--
73 CO7WT, Pavel.

Thanks for that info, Gordon!?

I'm planning to try Jack's VFO modified to use the AD9851 for my old Swan 250C 6 meter rig.?

--
John - WA2FZW