Conference Motivation

Conferences always act like a shot in the arm to me, they give me renewed energy to go home and get my projects working. This past weekend I attended the 35th Eastern VHF/UHF conference, sponsored by the NEWS group. When I got home this afternoon I decided to get motivated and put the finishing touches on my GPS Stabilized 10Mhz oscillator. This is the N1JEZ/W1GHZ/G3RUH design that was published a few years ago. I picked up a pair of boards and a pair of GPS units and got the system working on the bench, but never finished integrating it all into an enclosure. Here are a few shots:

There is a lot of extra space in the enclosure, I plan on making some additions to the box, including the incorporation of an Apollo synth board being sold by DEMI as the A32. This will allow me to generate weak signals, portable, from all bands 1296 and above. This is especially important at 10GHz, where is my current LO is all over the place. Having a 10GHz at a known frequency allows me to calculate my offset and at least be accurate in frequency.

I've standardized on the Anderson Power-Pole connectors, this is a chassis mount board that I borrowed from W1GHZ and used as board filler for an ExpressPCB order I did a while back. The serial port will give you access to the NMEA data from the GPS. I may give this a whirl with my NTP server.

The control board has 2x10MHz outputs, but I'll need one of them to feed into the A32 board. I could most likely split one of the connections but I need to see what the drive level is out of the 10MHz board.


And finally, my frequency counter thinks it's accurate. Of course, my freq counter hasn't been calibrated in years, so thats only according to *it's* LO.