There it is guys: A blank canvas of copper-clad board. A clean slate ready to be filled with the components for a BITX transceiver. As you can see, I am fighting my "build first, design/plan later" tendencies. No real design work for me on this one (thanks Farhan!) but I am trying to plan where everything will go on the board. (Thanks to Jim, W8NSA for the board.) I'm going to build it Manhattan style (perhaps with an ugly dead bug or two). I'm starting with a big board because I always seemed to end up with a shortage of space. It looks like I can easily get all of the circuit (minus the PA) on this board. I'll build the PA on a separate piece of copper-clad.
I'd like to build it for 17 meters, but if I stick with the 10 MHz filter that means I have to build a VFO at around 8.1 MHz. That's not impossible, but in my experience it is easier to build simple, stable VFOs at lower frequencies.
I notice that there are a lot of cheap crystals available at higher frequencies. So, instead of keeping the filter at 10 MHz and trying to get the VFO stable at 8.1, what do you guys think about keeping the VFO in the 4 MHz range and building the filter with crystals in the 14 MHz range?
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