Finally another installment on building the just released Sienna transceiver kit by DZKIT.
It's been a long time in coming, I know. Things came up and I haven't had time to work on it like I wanted to. Around Thanksgiving of last year I got back to it for a little bit and just now found time to post updates.
I part 4, I said I would go over building the Transmitter and PA, but first we ended up assembling and testing the receiver.
First thing we did was install the front panel and the IF Filter Board into the chassis, which you can see the IF Filter Board installed in this picture.
Then we put together the Receiver Band Pass Filters. This basically involved cutting a 36-pin mail header into 22 1 pin pieces and soldering them to the pre-assembled boards. You can see the results in the following picture.
Here you see the Band Pass Filters installed on the RXBPF board that we assembled previously.
Finally, this is a picture of the RXBPF board installed into the chassis with the cable connections made.
Brian didn't like the performance of the receiver with the standard 70.455Mhz filter so he sent everyone out a Inrad filter. You can see the new filter installed in the following picture.
Here is the receiver board installed in the chassis with all of the connections made.
So now it was on to the calibration and testing of the receiver. I started to follow the steps, but the receiver was deaf. This is where the quality of tech support Brian gave was amazing. Over a 2 week period, we must of emailed back and forth 30 times. Even helped me work on it on Thanksgiving day!
I found some bad solder joints on the DCD board that were preventing me from getting a signal to the receiver. i swear I looked at them a dozen times and they looked ok. Finally reheated them, and they worked. Still no audio unfortunately. So I messed with it for another week and Brian worked with me on it the whole time.
Finally, Brian suggested I send back the control panel and the receiver board for him to look at it. I did that and he found the problem. Turns out since I am one of the few people that was too cheap to purchase the kit with the controls there was a bug that when the faceless radio was turned on, the attenuator was enabled. Brian fixed the controller code so that it wouldn't do that anymore, and now it works.
Brian sent me an audio clip of the receiver after he fixed the code. You can listen to it hear:
http://w0wwv.org/images/sienna/part5/sienna.wavThis is Brian's explaination of the recording:
"Attached is a recording I made from my cell phone's audio recorder using your controller and receiver on 20M, with a 2.4kHz filter at 9MHz and 2.8kHz filter at 455kHz. The output was from the headphone jack going to some amplified external speakers. The internal speakers sound a little tinnier without the cover on. Partway through the audio, you will hear a switch click and then another one a few seconds later. That was a switch to an FT-767GX for comparison. This was an S7-S9 signal so you can hear the effect of the AGC, but weak signals are coming in fine too. I thought the Sienna was doing a better job on that signal than my 767GX. The acoustics in my shop aren't terrific and there was some background noise from the furnace, but I thought it sounded pretty good. Tell me what you think."
I got the boards back and and installed them back in the chassis. Everything worked flawlessly and in comparison to my Icom 746Pro, I think the audio sounds better. I can pick the signals out well. I feed them both into an old Kenwood SP-820 speaker and they both sound good.
So that's it for now. I am working on the Transmitter board now and should have something up in the next couple of weeks about it.
