[Boatanchors] [BoatAnchors] Western Electric 227B Marine Radio Telephone Lives!

[David Stinson]

Several people now have asked me about these programable 
oscillators.  In some applications, they have enough juju
"out of the box" to drive an oscillator stage.
In others, they'll need some help.  
But they're cheap so fiddling with them is easy.
Just don't hook them up backwards, pop a high 
DC voltage at the input or run VCC much over 6V.
If you do, they will *poof* and wing their way to
Silicon Heaven.

I like to use the EPSON 8002 series through-hole, 
CMOS oscillators. I get them from Digikey. 
I don't care about "jitter" or "noise" or any of
that other stuff.  They just work.
$4.10 each and they will do single quantities.
You tell them the freq you want *in Mhz* 
(they don't know KCs) in the "notes" section of the 
order form and they will program them for you. 
They've always shipped same day for me.
Here's a link to the kind I like, though many others 
would probably work OK:
http://www.digikey.com/short/784vdq

I've found you can run Vcc on these
up to 6 volts to get a little more "juju" out without harming
them. I use a little "buck" converter to bring the 12 volt
buss down to VCC.   Dropping resistor creates 
too much heat and I don't like waste anyways ;-)
You can get them on Ebay cheap as dirt.
There are lots of them. Here's one:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/311161462956

The little oscillators don't put out much but you can bet 
the signal is spot-on. Someone wrote me about a 
military SSB transceiver that was going to need hundreds
of bucks in crytals.
He ordered these, piped them in and his rig is cooking.
Another gentleman is going to try them in a AN/TRC-77.
Seem to drive receiver-type circuits OK directly 
with only a DC blocking cap on the output- 
I use like .004 just because I have them.
I'd bet in sandy-state OSC circuits, 
they'd have plenty of drive.

GL OM ES 73 DE Dave AB5S