Pete, Brad WA8WDQ and I were recently e-mailing about our admiration for what Hans G0UPL has achieved with his QCX rig. I cc'd Hans -- we got this nice and very informative e-mail. Be sure to click on the link provided by Hans, and from there go to the link to his FDIM proceedings article. I think that article is a real masterpiece -- there is a lot of very valuable information in there. For a long time, getting quadrature output from the Si5351 seemed like an impossible dream. But Hans has obviously figured out how to do this, opening the door to much better and simpler single-signal phasing receivers. Thanks Hans!
Hi all
Thanks for the nice feedback on the QCX and the FDIM conference proceedings a article, which I have published on QRP Labs web page along with other Dayton trip miscellany. See
My seminar presentation audio was recorded by Ham Radio Workbench podcast and they will be publishing it on 5th June.
The QCX kit has indeed been unbelievably popular, almost 5,000 kits have been sold since the launch on 21st August. It seems to have itched an itch that needed itching, in the QRP world. Sales continue to be strong and I'm currently preparing another batch of 1000 more.
I'm very proud of my 90-degree quadrature Si5351A and it helped me towards my low cost, high performance target for QCX. Abandoning the 74AC74 saves a part, reduces cost, reduces complexity, reduces board area (and hence more cost) and even seems to provide better performance (higher unwanted sideband rejection when using the Si5351A in quadrature mode). Getting the Si5351A to do this is one of those things which look easy afterwards. But at the time, and faced with SiLabs un-useful documentation, it took an awful lot of headscratching, trial and error!
73 Hans G0UPL
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This is great! I have been trying to get quadrature outputs from the Si5351 for a long time now, but could only get a stable output down to around 4.5MHz. I'm also very keen to try the Class E amp on this latest portable CW rig.
ReplyDelete73s
Charlie ZL2CTM