At our last board meeting Don, W6QS agreed to head a special committee attending to the design of the 30 MHz. I.F. circuit board for our 10 GHz. Gunnplexers. By design intent this PCB can also be readily configured to work as a 10 Meter narrow band receiver, in its own right, or to be assembled to function as a 6 Meter receiver. Don now has the design layout essentially complete, and we are looking forward to producing qualification boards in the near future.

We plan to fabricate about a half dozen boards as a prototype/qualification run. Some of these will be populated to work on 30 MHz. in a wide band mode, and a few will be built for 29 or 50 MHz. with 6 KHz. narrow bandwidth filters. We want to put some test time on the design before we commit to a larger order but, these first few boards should be twins of whatever larger quantities follow.

They will be commercial quality boards of .062 inch thickness FR-4 Fiberglass material. We will not use solder mask on the first 100 or so boards, so as to allow purchasers to experiment and use the boards for "black box" prototypes for their own projects. These first boards will have tin over bare copper circuit traces. By this fabrication method jumpers or circuit modifications will be easily available. All supplied board kits will have a parts list and assembly drawing, as well as the schematic. We would welcome the feedback comments of anyone who uses the boards in this manner for their own receiver projects!

We also have a solid state transmitter design that can also soon be made available in the same sort of PCB configuration. This initial transmitter/exciter will provide low power output and minimal power supply drain. It will operate from 12 volt DC, as will the receiver. The two boards could easily be configured to provide a hand held transceiver for either the 10 or 6 Meter bands. A base station antenna will allow the radios to communicate over thousands of miles when band conditions permit.

This paired configuration will operate on a two channel scheme. On the 10 Meter band they would work on 29.6, or 29.5 MHz. On the 6 Meter Band they would be crystaled for 50.30, or 50.36 MHz. operation. Later design plans already in the works would allow these basic units to drive power amplifiers that would provide between 50 to 500 Watt capability.

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