This is another piece of industry story time. This time it’s about Vislink MRC DAR Plus receivers and transmitters. It shows that even highly integrated devices in the USD 10K range can be repaired quickly and inexpensively. The MRC DAR Plus series transmitter / receiver are professional devices for studio-transmitter links (STL), transmitter-studio links (TSL), … [Read more…]
A while back, I was asked if I could repair a ODU for a BMS Truck-Coder II. Someone had managed to rip the N connector straight off the casing, including a bit of the microstrip line from the distributed element output filter. See what approach I took to fix the broken stripline. The BMS Truck-Coder … [Read more…]
There are tons of circuits for listening devices available on the internet. For the most part, they all have in common that they are virtually useless. This article shows how to build a reliable, small and inexpensive listening device using a PLL clock multiplier and a standard crystal. Most audio listening devices, also called spy … [Read more…]
Before clock multiplier circuits existed, they had to be implemented with discrete parts. This took up quite a bit time in design and prototyping. Luckily the days are over and we can use integrated clock multipliers such as the LOCO™ PLL clock multiplier ICS501. I stumbled across a box of ICS501 PLL clock multipliers from … [Read more…]
Mike from Mikeselectricstuff did a very neat teardown of an Anritsu spectrum analyzer. However, he did call RF circuit design Voodoo and implied it’s some sort of black art. But is it really? Let’s have a look. If you watched the video of Mike [1] from Mikeselectricstuff tearing down an Anritsu spectrum analyzer, you might … [Read more…]
Switched-capacitor filters are great alternatives to standard LC filters. Their frequency response can easily be controlled solely by an external clock signal. In this short article we will have a closer look at an extremely narrow switched-capacitor comb filter. For a homebrew EAS (Emergency Alert System) decoder I needed a very selective band pass filter … [Read more…]
When bench testing noise sensitive circuits, one needs an ultra clean power source. Low noise lab power supplies are usually bulky and expensive. Abracon challenges both the bulkiness and the expensiveness with their new low noise pocket sized ABPSM-ULN-A ultra low noise power supply module. With the ABPSM-ULN-A, Abracon intends to set a new standard … [Read more…]
Freescale’s new low-cost development platform FRDM-KL25Z featuring Freescale Semiconductor’s ARM® Cortex™-M0+ processor-based high performance, low-power Kinetis L series 32-bit MCUs has launched last Tuesday. Let’s check it out. The FRDM-KL25Z “Freedom” development platform is an extremely inexpensive development board with a Kinetis KL2 Family 32-bit ARM®CortexTM-M0+ MCU [1]. The Kinetis L-Series MCUs promise true 32-bit … [Read more…]