[NLRS] It works!

[David Palm]

>> Are you actually getting +6.7 dBm out of an MAR-6?  <<

Yup.  See attached photo.

Thanks for the great details on your plans.  I bought one board set and
parts to build "as is" and another set of blank boards for just the sort of
experimentation you're describing.  As you say, the price is definitely
right.

One part that really interests me is the Mini Circuits PMA-545+.  It doesn't
have enough gain for a receiver front-end, I think, but the noise figures
are impressive.  Maybe two of them would work for a hot, low noise
front-end.  It seems like it would be the foundation of a great pre-amp.
It's cheap, too.  Unfortunately, the package is rather awkward to work with,
but Chris Vanderkoy KF9OP has some ideas of how that can be overcome on the
bench.  Anybody ever contemplated using this part?

Thanks and 73,

David  W9HQ



On 5/12/10, Zack Widup <w9sz.zack at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> I bought those boards directly from W1GHZ. Really good prices!
>
> I went about it differently. I built up a KD6OZH phase-locking circuit
> using
> a 94.75 MHz crystal which is locked to a 10 MHz OCXO. Paul told me that if
> I
> used the same capacitor values for the first filter in the 756 MHz LO
> circuit that the 1152 MHz filter uses, it should multiply 94.75 MHz just
> fine to 758 MHz. I was curious about one thing, however. He uses an MAR-6
> for the final output stage of the LO board and according to the
> Minicircuits
> specs, the output at 1-dB compression point is only +3 dBm. I couldn't
> figure out how he was getting +7 dBm out of his.
>
> I built the whole thing up and got +2 dBm from the LO board. Seemed about
> right to me for an MAR-6. I sent an e-mail to Paul about this and he
> thought
> either he got some "hot" MAR-6's or the parts were mislabeled. Not a
> problem, though, because you can always add another MMIC on the transverter
> board to get the +7 dBm needed for the mixer.
>
> Are you actually getting +6.7 dBm out of an MAR-6?
>
> I haven't gotten the whole transverter built up yet but I plan on using
> some
> 903 MHz helical filters between the input/output stages and the power
> amp/receiver LNA. I built a WD5AGO/W5LUA preamp using the ATF36077/MGF61563
> lineup as the LNA.
>
> 73, Zack W9SZ
>
>
> On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 1:19 PM, David Palm <thepalmhq at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > I'm really not going to give you the blow by blow of my W1GHZ transverter
> > adventures on the e-mail list......really, I'm not ;o)
> >
> > But I did get my 756 MHz LO working today.  Full story at
> > http://w9hq.blogspot.com
> >
> > 73,
> >
> > David  W9HQ
>
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