Satellite Tuner Board becomes a 800MHZ - 1600MHz Signal Generator

I've been so busy on non Ham activities that I haven't had a chance to pursue my Ham projects. As a stop-gap measure here is something I recently finished. While it doesn't neatly fit the goals of my blog to be easily repeatable by the reader it will hopefully inspire you to attempt something similar. If you have one of these satellite receiver boards then I can provide further details and code to help. 

A while back a generous Ham, Fritz, was giving away some satellite tuner boards at the NCRG Hamfest.  The board had a nice TXCO but on closer inspection it also had some nice PLL chips (Si4133) and mmic amplifiers. So I downloaded the relevant datasheets and ruminated on what it could be used for. My ultimate goal is to use one of these to generate a WSPR transmission on 1296MHZ. But you have to crawl before you can walk!

Before modification the PLL section of the board looked like this:

After removing the superfluous controller chip from elsewhere on the board and cutting the board to fit into an enclosure it became a matter of delicately soldering some thin wires onto relevant via's. These wires then went to a new control board I made.

It transpires that my version of the chip did not have the IF Out function. Which meant I couldn't use it for 70cms or 2m. However, each PLL chip had two PLL's and I found I could cover 800 MHz to 1600 MHz in four overlapping ranges, with steps down to 10kHz. The only drawback was I couldn't load the frequencies fast enough to also make this work as a micro-controller based frequency sweeper. Each frequency change took around 50ms to achieve.

In due course I hope to take some photographs of the noise sidebands as the step size, or phase detector frequency, changes. This should illustrate why the largest possible step size should be used if you are interested in signal purity.

The chip can be purchased for around A$10 (US$7) in a TSSOP package which would be easier to work with than the ones I had on the tuner board. Which is why I didn't remove them but used them in-situ. If you would be interested in building one from scratch let me know. I think a signal generator that covered 2m, 70cm and 23cm would be a great project with a cost around A$50 (US$35).

While kits exist that generate frequencies like the ones this project does, there is enormous satisfaction in re-purposing something that was meant to be scrapped.

Regards
Richard VK6TT