Having moved away from various VHF / UHF transverters and used the TS-2000 and FT-847 “shack-in-the-box” 160m <> 70cms transceivers for many years, with both giving excellent results, it seemed at first a strange decision to embark on a project to build a new 2m transverter. I guess the driver for this was the desire to try and improve the EME system, and with the ease of integrating a transverter with the Elecraft K3 it seemed the way to go.
Having looked at what was available in both “off the shelf” and kit form, I decided to purchase Sam, G4DDK’s Anglian Transverter kit plus the 8W PA kit. These were built and fitted into an enclosure that was sized to also accomodate a future 116MHz PLL board and change over relays / switching for driving additional transverters for the GHz bands.
The following slide show highlights the various build stages through to the finished unit.
Both the transverter and PA went together exactly how Sam described in his detailed documentation. I included the 6dB attenuator on the input of the PA as recommended, also to ensure that the Mitsubishi RA08H1317M module runs cool on extended JT65b tests I chose to mount the module and PA circuit board directly on the heatsink. This did then necessitate some extra metalwork to cut a suitable rectangular hole in the back panel, which can be seen in the following photo.
To reduce the warm-up period and improve stability when first switching on, (important for JT65b operation especially when that new initial contact suddenly appears on the waterfall 🙂 ) I plan to install the ZL2BKC’s ZLPLL 116MHz LO which will be locked with the K3 to a 10MHz GPSDO standard. Until that project and upgrade is completed I have simply added a Murata “Posistor” crystal heater.
The transverter has been setup to provide ~ 3W output, this being just over what is needed to drive my EME amplifier. A simple resistive Wilkinson splitter, (using 0805 resistors and SMA connectors) is connected to the 28MHz output. This then enables me to receive on the K3 which is interfaced to a PC running 2 x WSJT and a FUNcube Dongle Pro+ which is used with MAP65.
Label front and rear panels.
Sam, G4DDK for his excellent kit and after sales support.