[ARC5] HF Converter - feeding mixer with a square wave?

[Phillip Carpenter]

Bob,

Can you please share the circuit diagram of your universal converter board that you used with the BC-453 receiver?

Phillip WB4PAC 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 17, 2022, at 11:56 AM, Robert Nickels <ranickels at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 3/17/2022 10:13 AM, Bob kb8tq wrote:
>> driving with a square wave vs driving with a sine wave is not a big deal.
> 
> That's been my experience too.   Mixing is inherently a non-linear process and whatever unwanted mixing products are created will mostly be suppressed by the tuned circuits ahead of and after the mixer.     It's not a technique for perfectionists but I found myself wanting to convert from one frequency to another often enough I designed a little universal converter board that uses an NE-602 mixer and an Epson programmable oscillator that's 2" square.    There's only one tuned circuit on the input but the result is good enough for my purposes, which has included putting the highly selective BC-453 on the ham bands (my modern version of Don Stoner's "Novice Q5er" and "Single Sideband Q5er") and for converting numerous AM boat and oddball commercial radios for ham band use.   Using the converter allows me to leave the original receiver unmolested and take advantage of it's filtering.
> 
> Here's a video I made showing it used to convert the 455 kHz IF of a low-end shortwave receiver up to 3395 kHz for display on a Heathkit SB-620 panadaptor:
> 
> https://youtu.be/iFT2atgLogo
> 
> I didn't go hunting for spurs but the resulting display shows that the technique works well.   A double-tuned preselector would be easy to add for more serious work.
> 
> 73,  Bob W9RAN
> 
> 
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