The VU-Transmitter for 20m

K.P.S.Kang, VU20WF of the recently formed VU QRP Club has designed several club projects based upon very small printed circuit boards. The first of these that I saw and built was a transmitter based on the W6BOY Pixie. My version is much bigger than the original - for ease of building.

The drawing shows the circuit of the VU Transmitter. T1 is a Colpitts oscillator with C1 and C2 forming the capacitive feedback divider. The oscillator is crystal controlled but VC provides some useful frequency shift. VC can be a small variable capacitor or a trimmer. The maximum capacitance should be in the 50 to 75pF range. Larger values offer more shift but attempting to move the frequency too much will produce instability and eventually the oscillation will cease. The addition of an inductor of about 16uH will offer several kHz of frequency shift. (see VXO Option)

C3 couples the signal to the power amplifier, T2. The biasing resistor R5 controls the output of T2. Usually a value in the range 33K to 100K is suitable. The higher the value - the higher the output of T2. 47K is a useful starting value for experimentation. I suggest that T2 is not run higher than 1 watt of RF output power. It will get warm and a small star heatsink ought to be fitted.

The collector load for T2, RFC1, is a home made RF Choke. Carefully wind 12 turns of 38 swg (about 34 awg) enamelled copper wire (any small enough gauge will do) through a ferrite bead. RFC2 is a small 100uH axial choke which is essential when using T2 as the receiver mixer. It also provides a useful RF load on the input of T2 and increases the drive to T2. The transmitter output is coupled from the collector of T2 via C4 to a low pass filter.

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