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Re: Norcal 40a (testing 4.9MHz xtals)


 

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Hi Ram,

Do you have an oscilloscope? If so look at the waveform from your crystal test oscillator--I bet it's more of a square wave than a sine wave and if so your counter is looking at the stronger 3rd harmonic component and reading that instead of the fundamental.

73,

Steve AA7U

On 11/11/2019 9:52 AM, Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan wrote:

I am very early into the project. As a first step, I thought of building a G3UUR crystal tester to select crystals for the filter and the oscillators. I have got about 100 4.9152 MHz crystals that I got from aliexpress. Last weekend I built the G3UUR Colpitts Oscillator (straight out of the EMRFD book and also described in many other webpages). I also have a counter with a 1 Hz resolution, again obtained from Aliexpress specifically to hook up into the Oscillator.

Unfortunately, when I plug in the 4.9152 MHz crystal, I get a reading of 14.742475. Looks like it is 3x the frequency of the crystal. I tested many from the lot of 100 crystals, which came in lots of 50 from two different vendors and they all read the same. I had a 28.04 MHz crystal which seem to be oscillating at the correct frequency. I don't know what to make out of these readings. Is the crystal, a 3rd overtone crystal? Or is it that the colpitts oscillator is designed to operate at a higher frequency and the 3rd harmonic is where the tuned circuit that comprise the crystal (which is inductive?) and the two capacitors are getting tuned?

73
--
Ram VU3RDD

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