Monday, December 24, 2012

A Christmas Present from Argentina


There is an old saying in Spanish:  "No hay mal que por bien no venga."   More or less this is the same idea as: "Every dark cloud has a silver lining."  Well, the dark cloud was my techno-agony with the parasitic oscillations (see below).  The silver lining was the e-mail from Edgardo, LU1AR, in Buenos Aires that helped me get rid of them.    Edgardo advised putting a resistor across the primaries of the JBOT amplifier stages.  This is an old "lower the Q" trick, the idea being that lowering the Q might help prevent the amp from self-oscillating.     I used 680 ohm resistors.   First I put one across the primary of Q1.  No joy. Then Q2.  No luck.  Then I put one right across the primary of that big output transformer.  That did it!  The parasitics disappeared.   And I still get a nice 4 watts of output.  Thanks Edgardo.  I hope to make a contact with this rig today. 

The real silver lining in this story comes, however, in the form of Edgardo's blog site.  Wow, what an inspiring example of Argentinian Knack.  Radios, telescopes, auto-giros.  This guy is also into homebrew DSB rigs.  Wonderful stuff.  Check it out.  (Google will translate it for you, if necessary, but even if you don't read Spanish, the pictures tell most of the story.) 
http://www.lu1ar.blogspot.com.ar/
Thanks to all who sent advice and encouragement.  Merry Christmas! 

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics" http://soldersmoke.com/book.htm Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmoke Our Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20

1 comment:

  1. I agree, great blog site. Plenty of practical circuits there to grab :-).

    OM Edgardo looks like that guy in the Dos Equis commercials, The Most Interesting Man in the World.

    "Stay thirsty, my friends".

    73.......Steve Smith WB6TNL

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