Glenn PCB's for STAR: buildes pictures

STAR Builders

If you stumbled across this page and are looking for more info. see also www.carnut.info/star-parts/glennpcbs.htm

A few pictures sent in by builders of these PCB's.

Pictures are in order received.

I will be moving each builder to his own page as time permits, to ease the picure loading.

NEW see end of page for Paul, M1PVC's build.

Dec 2007 NEWS!!! 1st of these STAR's is now on air !!! move down the page.

Mar, 2008, My own is on air also ! (VK3PE)

May, 2008, Elia sent some pictures.

June 16, 2008, Dan sent some pics of BPF with toroids

June 25th, 2008. Some pictures from Jay

July 25th, 2008, Paul M1PVC, now has his STAR on air, with 140W! 090808 more pics added

Aug 18th, 2008, Dave VK3DSB (ex vkfuel) now has his STAR on air with 12w.

Aug 22nd, 2008, Very interesting variation on STAR build by Mats SM0RJV

20th Aug 2008 Bob, 5B4AGN, now has his 2nd STAR up and running.

Sept, 25th, 2008 Les sent some pictures of his home built (pcb's) STAR

Page may take a while to load with lots of pictures.

VK3DSB (EX vk3fuel)

3rd Nov. Pictures sent by VK3FUEL of his Picnmix mounted on temporary chassis. Note the brass opto wheel. See pictures below also.

First time "On Air" was last Tuesday (12-8-08) night with Paul VK3DPW in Langwarren on 80M. All in all a fantastic feeling, with many thanks to you and Chris for all your hard work. Hope we can hear each other tonight if your going to be on.

4th Nov: Chris, GM4YLN, says the DSP was easier to solder than he thought it would be.

5th Nov: My PCB checker, Chris S., has been very busy having assembled nearly all the PCB's So busy in fact he has decided to take a rest in Spain !

Just scared myself. I put together the DSP PCB and DSP motherboard. All ready for a first power on test. NO Flashing LED!!! The LED just came on and that was it. Could see no bus activity with the scope, so I thought "I've buggered the DSP chip". Then I pulled the EPROM and got bus activity:o I checked the EPROM (an Intel D27C512) on the programmer and it verified OK. Programmed another, same type and no go. Found an AMD 27C512 and programmed that. Everything is fine now!! Got the famous or infamous flashing LED and current draw is exactly as you specified on the schematics. Don't know what the go is with the Intel EPROM's. They check out OK on my programmer, but refuse to work on the DSP Board. All the EPROM's are 150nS types regardless of brand. Might be something for people to watch out for, or it could be just the ones I have got here.

Glenn Just a quick note to let you know my PCB's aren't sitting in a drawer. They're 90% assembled and waiting for delivery of extra parts. I expect these next week but have CQWW CW coming up, so I won't get to do anything more until the week after. I hope to be able to get the modules ready for test by the end of the month. I'll keep you informed of progress.

20th Aug 2008 Bob, 5B4AGN, fittingly, had his 2nd STAR up and running with the 1st 20M QSO to G3XJP

6th Dec Paul has emailed in his current progress. Going very well so far. Paul used the ITT crystal filter.

I made it on the air today with STAR and got really good reports. Lots of tidying up work to do and more LPFs to make together with some better T/R switching. Many thanks indeed Glenn for all your help and for the fantastic work you did with the boards and the documentation. A real labour of love for which I will always be grateful. Maybe one day when a path is open between UK and Oz we’ll have a QSO with our STARs!

The QSO was on 3.727 MHz with G4HMC, G4YYD, G3XJS, G0SEY and G8IBR. It was the regular daily homebrew net at 1300 GMT.

Russ K0QJ has been hard at work and has a very interesting display. Russ uses a graphics LCD and his own controller software.

25th March, 2008. Viv is now in the testing phase of the buildup. Viv also has a very clever way of making the Opto Encoder with ball bearings, with minimal metal work being required.

8th Jan 08 Bob Miller is making excellent progress. Mechanical work i think takes the longest time in these projects and Bob's is looking great !

March 2008, Ron Breukers has made his own version of Picnmix with DDS also on board. Nice job.

120408 Paul M1PVC has sent me an update of his STAR build. His work is first class, a credit to him and an inspiration.

I found a metal instrument case in my collection which is only slightly smaller than Peter's picastar, a little narrower. It's proving to be a bit of a shoe horn job but at last I think that I've cracked it.

I have attached some photos for your information. Progress is as follows - All boards populated apart from 20W PA FET's The DDS carrier is complete but not fitted yet ( soldering that chip got me going!). Encoder constructed and tested OK - I am a model engineer with a well equipped workshop so I was in my element here.

I also machined the aluminium/brass knob which also acts as a flywheel. The encoder runs with ball races back and front and a long bronze bush carries the shaft though the front panel and gives some slight friction to improve the "feel" DSP/IF carrier constructed from double sided PCB material and the PCB's integrated. Case sub-divided with aluminium screens and partitions. The spaces shown left in the pictures are there to accommodate the PA and LPF Prior to receiving your boards, I had already constructed the 150W PA and the BPF modules.

The next jobs are to carry out the inter PCB wiring, populate the rear panel, screen the Butler osc., complete the PA and LPF modules and continue with the testing and commissioning regime. All great fun but the Summer, holidays and the XYL will probably now slow me down.

9th August, Paul advises he has almost finished and has G6ALU's 140W PA installed also.See link above

I am sending some photo's of my make shift workplace, the PCB's in various stages of population/completion and the most recent stage of my STAR.

What remains is to wire all the PCB's, fit the PA's and find a good way of distributing power to everything. Not shown on the photos is the optical encoder assembly, that is nearly finished and waiting to be fitted in the case.

If all goes well there should be one more STAR on the air added to the list pretty soon.

I was just sending these to a friend and thought you might like to see them also.

The BPF brick with 30 metre and IF trap using toroids. Looks like they were supposed to be there!

17th June 2008 Details of toroids: (this is NOT an official mod. but is shown for interest)

T50-2 x3 for the thirty meter filter, 16.7 µH from the calculator should be 58 turns, but I had to remove two or three from all of them in the event, to get the filter spot on. T68-2 for the IF trap. I dunno how many turns, I just more or less filled it up and then resonated it at 10.7 MHz with the combination of trimmer and fixed mica cap. Ceramic trimmer in this one and air spaced the first time, not a lot of difference.

Toroids that are not full can be trimmed by moving the turns in or out, but that ain't possible when they are pretty much full up of course, as is the case with the 30 metre ones. The main thing is that the much higher Q of the toroids on 30 metres brings the insertion loss down to something reasonable from the more than 10 dB I was getting with the Tokos.

The IF trap gives a nice notch at 10.7 (50 plus dB) and less skewing and distortion of the wanted pass band on 30 as well. For those who don't use 30, which includes most of the ssb mob, it isn't of any interest of course, but I do like 30, myself... The only other thing I altered was to move the IF in / out feed to the 160 metre end with a bit of hard line, it's hidden under the brass strip.

Here are some pix as promised...as you can see, I've yet to master the art of digital photography. ............................................................

Haven't taken exams and applied for a US licence yet, anyway, so for now I am concentrating on getting a working Rx.

Congrats to you and Chris...the boards were a joy to work with and build time as of yesterday was exactly 3 months.

A very interesting variation on STAR by Mats SM0RJV who has made his own PCB's (ie redesigned) to suit parts at hand etc.

My name is Les GW3PEX , and have produced all PC boards from the drawings using the iron -on method.