The blog of a dedicated radio amateur and electronics enthusiast

"Having fun on the air and in the workshop - communicating and creating"

14 November 2012

Improved phasing exciter

I have completed some improvements to the single-sideband phasing exciter, ( post 25 January 2010 ), for my longwave transmitter, just in time for use during the good propagation conditions on the 2190m band over the winter.
The passive phase shift network was not producing accurate 0 and 90 degree phase shifted AF. In fact it was well outside specification; perhaps not surprising as I bought it in 1978. So I replaced it with an active circuit based on a dual op-amp. I optimised the unwanted ( lower ) sideband suppression at 800Hz. There is little point anyway in achieving exact quadrature audio channels over the entire speech band as the modes in use on longwave are extremely narrow-band.
I added a tuned class-A post-mixer transistor amplifier stage.
Upper sideband is now selected automatically as I have disabled the sideband switching facility; until such time when I see a lower sideband signal on the band.
The top picture is my signal, received on 137.7KHz, from just the exciter sitting on the workbench, ( lower pic ), when transmitting using chirped multi-tone Hellschreiber mode. As can be seen, the signal occupies only about 5Hz of band !

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