Poor receive levels
Posted: 07 Apr 2022, 14:28
Hi everyone,
I have my kit put together powered up and am starting to test things.
It currently transmits on all the bands at 3.8~4.1W at 12V with 81~83% efficiency. I can work on the toroids a bit later to see if I can improve that.
However there is very limited receive. A signal that is coming in 59+10db is only sometimes moving the S meter up to S4, but generally throughout 20 and 40M it just sits flat at S3 and I can only hear super strong stations.
I believe there are two possible causes:
1: T1 has a bad electrical connection
2: LT6231 is bad
Is there any simple test I can perform to determine if either is the potential cause, I especially would not like to desolder the IC chip if I can avoid it, so anything I can do to confirm that is the case if rewinding T1 does not solve the issue would be helpful.
Any other suggestions or potential diagnosis are also welcome.
David / JJ1ILX
I have my kit put together powered up and am starting to test things.
It currently transmits on all the bands at 3.8~4.1W at 12V with 81~83% efficiency. I can work on the toroids a bit later to see if I can improve that.
However there is very limited receive. A signal that is coming in 59+10db is only sometimes moving the S meter up to S4, but generally throughout 20 and 40M it just sits flat at S3 and I can only hear super strong stations.
I believe there are two possible causes:
1: T1 has a bad electrical connection
2: LT6231 is bad
Is there any simple test I can perform to determine if either is the potential cause, I especially would not like to desolder the IC chip if I can avoid it, so anything I can do to confirm that is the case if rewinding T1 does not solve the issue would be helpful.
Any other suggestions or potential diagnosis are also welcome.
David / JJ1ILX