What a FUN project!!!!!

Okay, so here it is under construction:

Ran Technology 4 channel oscillator board

What a neat little project!  First a little background.  I have some ham friends that go to the big hamfest in Friedrichshafen and also to Dayton.  I always make the same requests:

1. please find me another 70cm yagi antenna for 430 to 440

2. I need more crystals, especially 14.*** mhz and 7.*** mhz, 

Every year I get the same answer:  Sorry, didn't see any crystals there.

Now, I know that I can take a higher frequency crystal and grind it down to the frequency I need; my friend 4x1zz took a short seminar on how to do this correctly and he even has a crystal frequency oscillator reader that he built in Dayton.

HOWEVER, I still don't have the crystals I need to cover all of the 20m CW portion with my homebrew transmitters.  So what's a frustrated tinkerer to do?

Well, the folks at https://hayseedhamfest.com are selling for only $16.50, a 4-channel oscillator board.  What's great about this?  Well for one thing, you can plug in 4 oscillator chips available from Digi-key for about $5 each.  You tell Digi-key which frequencies you want on your chips, and then you plug them in.  That gives you 4 frequencies on the board.

I'm so excited about this that I can't wait to plug it into my 5 watt transmitter and be able to cover the 20m band from 14.000 to 14.070 just by choosing one of my four crystal oscillator chip channels.

And here is the chip itself:

The 4 pin oscillator from Digi-key

This oscillator chip has 4 pins.  It plugs into an 8-pin dip (off which there are 4 on the board).  The above chip is set permanently at 14.030.  My rig will tune about 14.030 down to 14.015 using this chip.  That is 15 khz of coverage with a $5 chip.  There are four pin through holes on the board, so you will have to clip off the 4 inner pins from the dip socket to make it fit.

CLICK HERE to see the Digi-key part.

My board is just now under construction.  Looks like the whole board will take about 30 to 45 minutes to build.  So as soon as I get it up and running, I will let y'all know how this really neat board functions as a replacement for actual crystals. Like these:

If the 4 channel board works as expected, then there will be no more searching for a certain crystal, all you have to do is just use a switch to click from crystal A B C or D in the frequency range you need.

The completed board without the chips installed

So stay-tuned and I will let you know how it does.

73

Mark 4x1ks