The QRP Labs Ultimate 3S beacon (kit) is a reasonably-priced, compact and self-contained unit capable of operating on any amateur band from 2200 meters through the U.S. 222 MHz band.
Sort of.
Actually, it's not really that simple: For operation on 160 through 10 meters, the construction is rather straightforward but for the higher and lower frequency bands, a few "mods" have to be made.
The power amplifier:
To minimize the cost, the power amplifier section (Q1-Q3) of the Ultimate 3S beacon uses some generic BS170 N-channel low-power MOSFET transistors. These devices are capable of dissipating about 1/3 of a watt each and there is room for three of these devices. If an efficiency of about 50% can be obtained, it should be possible to safely get between 0.1 and 0.5 watts out of the beacon - plenty for modes that allow very weak signals to be detected such as WSPR.
But, there is a problem. The BS170 is not an RF transistor, designed for low-power switching such as turning on LEDs, small motors and relays. At low frequencies - up to several MHz - it actually works quite well capable of about a watt if three devices are installed, but by the time one gets to 10 meters it is, in this application, rather challenging to get more than about 100 milliwatts from the Ultimate 3 without a bit of tweaking.
One of the first options the builder can choose is whether to wire the PA transistors for 5 volts, or connected it to a higher-voltage power supply. In general, using a higher-voltage supply - say, 12 volts - will enable somewhat higher RF output power, but this also means that the same amount of bias current at 5 volts will result in higher power dissipation and finding the best value - without blowing up the transistors - is a bit of a delicate dance.
The problems:
The problems with this device at 10 meters (and up) include:
One of the methods to deal with limited drive signals is to bias the transistor slightly. Because it - like any similar FET - takes a volt or three to start turning on, biasing the transistor "on" slightly with a fixed DC voltage means that the limited RF drive signal doesn't have as "far to go" when it comes to driving the device.
Adding this bias works well - but only to a point: Eventually, the transistor is conducting so much DC current that it is dissipating heat at/near its maximum rating and increasing the bias even more is not an option. One option is to add heat sinking (by gluing the transistors to a piece of aluminum or copper) to keep them cool, but this is of limited utility.
The Ultimate 3 beacon has the capability of using up to three of these transistors in parallel and while this can improve the power output at lower frequencies (maybe) the limited drive capability of the synthesizer - plus the fact that each transistor has its own capacitance - doesn't necessarily help.
Work-arounds:
The BS170 is quite popular in QRP transmitters because it is cheap, but it can be made to work "less badly" and the best way to do this is to strongly drive its gate with an RF signal. Often, high-speed CMOS gates are used for this such as a 74AS04 or equivalent with multiple sections wired in parallel. Doing this "brute force" drive technique can greatly improve the output capability of this otherwise low-frequency device. Unfortunately, the Ultimate 3 beacon doesn't have a device like this, connecting the output of the synthesizer (more or less) directly to the output transistor, but one could hack the circuit and wire such a device into the circuit.
Another work-around would be the use of a transistor specifically designed for RF use. While there are may such devices available, most are quite expensive or difficult to find.
One such device is the RD16HHF1 made by Mitsubishi, but this transistor is becoming increasingly difficult to find. It is also a favorite for counterfeiters that take an ordinary FET's die, put it in a package and label it as the real thing: It may work on lower bands, but it falls apart at higher bands. Some counterfeiters don't even bother to do this, taking an ordinary power FET and label it as an RD16HHHF1: Because the drain and source of the RD16HHF1 is backwards from "normal" FETs, a device like this will simply short out the power supply!
The PD85004:
In perusing the catalogs, I determined that a likely candidate device was the PD85004, made by ST Microdevices. This device, designed to operate from 13.8 volts, is rated to output over a watt at 900 MHz, so it should surely be coaxed to work at HF, right? This devices is far more expensive, costing about $3.25 each in single quantities as opposed to $0.50 each for the BS170 - but the expense isn't very onerous - and it is cheaper than the typical genuine RF16HHF1 - and it is rated for operation at 13.8 volts, which happened to be the voltage used to power the final amplifier section of the beacon.
One complication with the use of this device is that it is available only in a surface-mount package. Fortunately, I had on hand some SOT-89-4 "carrier" boards (readily available on EvilBay - search for "SOT-89 adapter board") to which I soldered the device, effectively turning it into a leaded device that can be wired into the original FETs' board locations. These boards cost anywhere from $0.03-$0.20 each, if you buy 10 - and that price often includes shipping!
To improve dissipation, a piece of copper flashing was carefully soldered to the tab of this device after it was mounted to the carrier (see Figure 3.) While the rated dissipation of this device is 6 watts, the mechanical layout of the Ultimate 3 beacon significantly limits the size of the heat sink as well as how much heat can be radiated.
Modifying the U3 for use with the PD85004:
Initially, I wired a PD85004 in place of a BS170 - but owing to the fact that the new device was designed to operate near 1 GHz and that the layout of the U3 circuit board didn't look to be particularly "VHF friendly" I expected there to be some problems. Before powering it up for the first time I turned the bias potentiometer all of the way down and pre-set my bench supply to current-limit at 500 milliamps - just in case I'd miswired something or I'd managed to turn the bias control all of the way up, instead.
Powering up the beacon and temporarily disabling transmit (easily done in WSPR mode by disconnecting the GPS antenna it that is used for timing) I noted the current consumption - about 350 mA - much of that the LCD's back light - and carefully adjusted the bias to cause a 100mA increase in current consumption. With the antenna output of the beacon connected to a dummy load via a wattmeter, I then reconnected the GPS antenna and waited for the unit to cycle through the various amateur bands while listening, in turn, to each frequency on a local receiver.
The result - not unexpected - was that I was able to get power on each band, but on 160 through 40 meters I heard a loud "hiss" +/-20 kHz from the transmit frequency instead of a CW note while the higher bands, 30-10, sounded normal. This just goes to show that at these frequencies this GHz-rated device would need some "taming" and that a wattmeter not necessarily useful for determining of an amplifier is working properly!
To tame the amplifier, I did several things:
I then proceeded to carefully adjust the bias and watch the power meter. Monitoring the temperature of the small piece of copper heat sinking I found that I could safely get about 1.5 watts out on 160-20 meters, dropping to about a watt on 10 meters, but erring on the side of caution I backed this off a bit to about 0.75 watts on 10 meters.
On the air testing:
My "main" HF antenna is a "lazy loop" of about 225 feet (approx. 70 meters) circumference at an average height of around 30 feet (about 10 meters) feed with 400 ohm window line with a 1:1 balun in the shack. What this means is that it is not resonant on any particular frequency, typically having a VSWR of greater than 5:1 on most bands. While this may sound bad, the window line itself contributes negiligible loss of its own and a reasonably-designed power amplifier should be able to tolerate such a mismatch. I've run it this way from months with the BS170 finals without a problem and I've gotten reasonable signal reports.
When I connected the modified Ultimate 3S beacon to this antenna, everything worked fine - until I got to 40 meters, at which point the display would go blank and I'd hear a loud "click" on the local receiver. Apparently, the bad termination of the antenna caused the amplifier section to "take off" into some sort of mode of instability and somehow crash the beacon.
Adding a "wee bit" of attenuation:
The work-around was to add an (approximately) 1.5dB resistive pad in series with output antenna connection. Consisting of two 3.9 ohms resistors and a 220 ohm resistor in a "Tee" arrangement, this prevented the return loss as seen by the beacon from ever exceeding about 3dB, or a VSWR of about 6:1. This little bit of padding reduced the transmit power only a fraction of an "S" unit, but was sufficient to keep the amplifier stable on all of the bands.
The addition of a bit of attenuation on a transmitter like this isn't necessarily a bad thing as it can offer a bit of protection - both in terms of VSWR and things like lightning strikes, offering both a DC discharge and a bit of a "sponge" of excess power. Even with this bit of attenuation, I can safely coax about 1 watt of RF output on 160 through 20 meters, dropping to a bit over 0.5 watts on 10 meters - about 10dB better than I'd managed with a single BS170 on that band.
Upon installing another Ultimate 3S for the WA7X beacon - this system operating exclusively on 10 meters - we discovered, the hard way, that the optional 5 watt amplifier (using an RD16HHF1) didn't like it when the 10 meter vertical was temporarily detuned due to snow, causing a mismatch that seemed to result in the coincident failure of the output transistor. In that case we added a 2 dB resistive pad to prevent the beacon from ever seeing worse than a 4.5:1 VSWR (if the antenna connection were accidentally removed) and instead of 5 watts, the beacon is now operating at 2 watts and pretty bullet-proof.
If that hadn't worked to stop the instability...
If the amplifier hadn't been adequately stabilized by the aforementioned modifications, there would have been two more things that I would have tried:
Ultimately, I hope to connect the beacon to an antenna (perhaps a trapped vertical) that is resonant on at least most of the bands on which the beacon operates, but in the mean time, this seems to be working out pretty well.
Final comments:
I started out this blog entry with the mention of bands above 10 meters, which naturally brings up the question: Will this same modification work on 6 meters and higher?
The simple answer is yes, probably. While I can imagine that it should be possible to obtain, perhaps, 0.25-0.5 watts on 6 meters with this same device, using similar techniques, going up much higher and getting some RF power will probably require a bit of modification as the board layouts and interconnects start to get a bit "iffy" at VHF.
[End]
Stolen from ka7oei.blogspot.com
Sort of.
Actually, it's not really that simple: For operation on 160 through 10 meters, the construction is rather straightforward but for the higher and lower frequency bands, a few "mods" have to be made.
The power amplifier:
 |
| Figure 1: The front panel of my Ultimate 3S beacon, WSPRing away on 20 meters. You can tell that I live in the U.S. by the position of the "power" switch! Click on the image for a larger version. |
To minimize the cost, the power amplifier section (Q1-Q3) of the Ultimate 3S beacon uses some generic BS170 N-channel low-power MOSFET transistors. These devices are capable of dissipating about 1/3 of a watt each and there is room for three of these devices. If an efficiency of about 50% can be obtained, it should be possible to safely get between 0.1 and 0.5 watts out of the beacon - plenty for modes that allow very weak signals to be detected such as WSPR.
But, there is a problem. The BS170 is not an RF transistor, designed for low-power switching such as turning on LEDs, small motors and relays. At low frequencies - up to several MHz - it actually works quite well capable of about a watt if three devices are installed, but by the time one gets to 10 meters it is, in this application, rather challenging to get more than about 100 milliwatts from the Ultimate 3 without a bit of tweaking.
One of the first options the builder can choose is whether to wire the PA transistors for 5 volts, or connected it to a higher-voltage power supply. In general, using a higher-voltage supply - say, 12 volts - will enable somewhat higher RF output power, but this also means that the same amount of bias current at 5 volts will result in higher power dissipation and finding the best value - without blowing up the transistors - is a bit of a delicate dance.
The problems:
The problems with this device at 10 meters (and up) include:
- Device capacitance. There are a number of parasitic reactances involved - including the input and Miller capacitance. All of these conspire to make it more difficult to turn the FET on and off quickly - something that needs to be done to amplify higher frequencies efficiently.
- The drive capability is rather limited. The power amplifier section of the Ultimate 3 beacon is driven directly by the synthesizer which, for older units could be a DDS board, but for the more recent versions use the Si5351 synthesizer chip. Neither of these devices produce enough output to "fully" drive the FET's gate.
One of the methods to deal with limited drive signals is to bias the transistor slightly. Because it - like any similar FET - takes a volt or three to start turning on, biasing the transistor "on" slightly with a fixed DC voltage means that the limited RF drive signal doesn't have as "far to go" when it comes to driving the device.
Adding this bias works well - but only to a point: Eventually, the transistor is conducting so much DC current that it is dissipating heat at/near its maximum rating and increasing the bias even more is not an option. One option is to add heat sinking (by gluing the transistors to a piece of aluminum or copper) to keep them cool, but this is of limited utility.
The Ultimate 3 beacon has the capability of using up to three of these transistors in parallel and while this can improve the power output at lower frequencies (maybe) the limited drive capability of the synthesizer - plus the fact that each transistor has its own capacitance - doesn't necessarily help.
Work-arounds:
The BS170 is quite popular in QRP transmitters because it is cheap, but it can be made to work "less badly" and the best way to do this is to strongly drive its gate with an RF signal. Often, high-speed CMOS gates are used for this such as a 74AS04 or equivalent with multiple sections wired in parallel. Doing this "brute force" drive technique can greatly improve the output capability of this otherwise low-frequency device. Unfortunately, the Ultimate 3 beacon doesn't have a device like this, connecting the output of the synthesizer (more or less) directly to the output transistor, but one could hack the circuit and wire such a device into the circuit.
Another work-around would be the use of a transistor specifically designed for RF use. While there are may such devices available, most are quite expensive or difficult to find.
One such device is the RD16HHF1 made by Mitsubishi, but this transistor is becoming increasingly difficult to find. It is also a favorite for counterfeiters that take an ordinary FET's die, put it in a package and label it as the real thing: It may work on lower bands, but it falls apart at higher bands. Some counterfeiters don't even bother to do this, taking an ordinary power FET and label it as an RD16HHHF1: Because the drain and source of the RD16HHF1 is backwards from "normal" FETs, a device like this will simply short out the power supply!
The PD85004:
In perusing the catalogs, I determined that a likely candidate device was the PD85004, made by ST Microdevices. This device, designed to operate from 13.8 volts, is rated to output over a watt at 900 MHz, so it should surely be coaxed to work at HF, right? This devices is far more expensive, costing about $3.25 each in single quantities as opposed to $0.50 each for the BS170 - but the expense isn't very onerous - and it is cheaper than the typical genuine RF16HHF1 - and it is rated for operation at 13.8 volts, which happened to be the voltage used to power the final amplifier section of the beacon.
 |
| Figure 2: The PD85004 mounted to an EvilBay SOT-89-4 carrier. Short wire leads go in holes 1, 2 and 3 to effectively turn it into a through-hole device. The heat sink was not yet added when this picture was taken. Click on the image for a slightly larger version. |
One complication with the use of this device is that it is available only in a surface-mount package. Fortunately, I had on hand some SOT-89-4 "carrier" boards (readily available on EvilBay - search for "SOT-89 adapter board") to which I soldered the device, effectively turning it into a leaded device that can be wired into the original FETs' board locations. These boards cost anywhere from $0.03-$0.20 each, if you buy 10 - and that price often includes shipping!
To improve dissipation, a piece of copper flashing was carefully soldered to the tab of this device after it was mounted to the carrier (see Figure 3.) While the rated dissipation of this device is 6 watts, the mechanical layout of the Ultimate 3 beacon significantly limits the size of the heat sink as well as how much heat can be radiated.
Modifying the U3 for use with the PD85004:
Initially, I wired a PD85004 in place of a BS170 - but owing to the fact that the new device was designed to operate near 1 GHz and that the layout of the U3 circuit board didn't look to be particularly "VHF friendly" I expected there to be some problems. Before powering it up for the first time I turned the bias potentiometer all of the way down and pre-set my bench supply to current-limit at 500 milliamps - just in case I'd miswired something or I'd managed to turn the bias control all of the way up, instead.
Powering up the beacon and temporarily disabling transmit (easily done in WSPR mode by disconnecting the GPS antenna it that is used for timing) I noted the current consumption - about 350 mA - much of that the LCD's back light - and carefully adjusted the bias to cause a 100mA increase in current consumption. With the antenna output of the beacon connected to a dummy load via a wattmeter, I then reconnected the GPS antenna and waited for the unit to cycle through the various amateur bands while listening, in turn, to each frequency on a local receiver.
The result - not unexpected - was that I was able to get power on each band, but on 160 through 40 meters I heard a loud "hiss" +/-20 kHz from the transmit frequency instead of a CW note while the higher bands, 30-10, sounded normal. This just goes to show that at these frequencies this GHz-rated device would need some "taming" and that a wattmeter not necessarily useful for determining of an amplifier is working properly!
To tame the amplifier, I did several things:
- In installed a 0.1uF between the wiper of the bias adjustment potentiometer R5 and ground.
- I placed a 220 ohm resistor in parallel with R6 from the bias supply. This, along with the added capacitor, helped "swamp" the drive signal and provide low-frequency termination of the device's gate.
- I replaced the wire lead on the SOT-89 carrier that provided the gate connection with a 10 ohm resistor. This added resistance helps to break up spurious reactances that can cause the transistor to behave badly.
I then proceeded to carefully adjust the bias and watch the power meter. Monitoring the temperature of the small piece of copper heat sinking I found that I could safely get about 1.5 watts out on 160-20 meters, dropping to about a watt on 10 meters, but erring on the side of caution I backed this off a bit to about 0.75 watts on 10 meters.
 |
| Figure 3: The installed PD85004 with heat sink in the Ultimate 3S beacon for initial testing. A piece of copper was soldered to the tab of the transistor to allow it to dissipate a couple watts of heat. Unfortunately, there isn't really an easy way to make the heat sink capable of dissipating significantly more heat without mechanically complicating things. Not visible in this picture are the added 0.1uF capacitor between the wiper of R5 (the pot visible to the left of the transistor) and ground and the 220 ohm resistor in parallel with R6. This picture was taken before the 10 ohm resistor was put in series with the transistor's gate to quell instability, replacing the wire lead at position "1" on the carrier. Note that the connections from two of the three original BS170 positions were used to wire this transistor into the circuit. Again, the PA section of my beacon is wired to operate from 13.8 volts. Click on the image for a larger version. |
On the air testing:
My "main" HF antenna is a "lazy loop" of about 225 feet (approx. 70 meters) circumference at an average height of around 30 feet (about 10 meters) feed with 400 ohm window line with a 1:1 balun in the shack. What this means is that it is not resonant on any particular frequency, typically having a VSWR of greater than 5:1 on most bands. While this may sound bad, the window line itself contributes negiligible loss of its own and a reasonably-designed power amplifier should be able to tolerate such a mismatch. I've run it this way from months with the BS170 finals without a problem and I've gotten reasonable signal reports.
When I connected the modified Ultimate 3S beacon to this antenna, everything worked fine - until I got to 40 meters, at which point the display would go blank and I'd hear a loud "click" on the local receiver. Apparently, the bad termination of the antenna caused the amplifier section to "take off" into some sort of mode of instability and somehow crash the beacon.
Adding a "wee bit" of attenuation:
The work-around was to add an (approximately) 1.5dB resistive pad in series with output antenna connection. Consisting of two 3.9 ohms resistors and a 220 ohm resistor in a "Tee" arrangement, this prevented the return loss as seen by the beacon from ever exceeding about 3dB, or a VSWR of about 6:1. This little bit of padding reduced the transmit power only a fraction of an "S" unit, but was sufficient to keep the amplifier stable on all of the bands.
 |
| Figure 4: Typical "T" type resistive attenuator that can be useful for preventing instability and/or damage to the final transistor in the event of a poor match to 50 ohms. These resistors were wired/mounted at the RF output connector, after any low-pass filtering. For Ra I used the standard values of 3.9 ohms and for Rb, 220 ohms, resulting in approximately 1.5dB of attenuation. For the 2.5 dB attenuator on the WA7X beacon, Ra was 6.8 ohms and Rb was 180 ohms. Neither of these sets of values are precise for a 50 ohm system, but they are "good enough"! |
The addition of a bit of attenuation on a transmitter like this isn't necessarily a bad thing as it can offer a bit of protection - both in terms of VSWR and things like lightning strikes, offering both a DC discharge and a bit of a "sponge" of excess power. Even with this bit of attenuation, I can safely coax about 1 watt of RF output on 160 through 20 meters, dropping to a bit over 0.5 watts on 10 meters - about 10dB better than I'd managed with a single BS170 on that band.
Upon installing another Ultimate 3S for the WA7X beacon - this system operating exclusively on 10 meters - we discovered, the hard way, that the optional 5 watt amplifier (using an RD16HHF1) didn't like it when the 10 meter vertical was temporarily detuned due to snow, causing a mismatch that seemed to result in the coincident failure of the output transistor. In that case we added a 2 dB resistive pad to prevent the beacon from ever seeing worse than a 4.5:1 VSWR (if the antenna connection were accidentally removed) and instead of 5 watts, the beacon is now operating at 2 watts and pretty bullet-proof.
If that hadn't worked to stop the instability...
If the amplifier hadn't been adequately stabilized by the aforementioned modifications, there would have been two more things that I would have tried:
- Add a 220-470 ohm resistor across T1, the output transformer, between V+ and the output transistor drain. This resistor would help "Q-spoil" a low frequency resonance that can cause similar oscillations - often due to the fact that RF devices can have tremendous gain at very low frequencies.
- Add a series 1k resistor and 0.1uF capacitor between the output transistor drain and gate. This degenerative feedback will also help quell low frequency oscillations.
Ultimately, I hope to connect the beacon to an antenna (perhaps a trapped vertical) that is resonant on at least most of the bands on which the beacon operates, but in the mean time, this seems to be working out pretty well.
Final comments:
I started out this blog entry with the mention of bands above 10 meters, which naturally brings up the question: Will this same modification work on 6 meters and higher?
The simple answer is yes, probably. While I can imagine that it should be possible to obtain, perhaps, 0.25-0.5 watts on 6 meters with this same device, using similar techniques, going up much higher and getting some RF power will probably require a bit of modification as the board layouts and interconnects start to get a bit "iffy" at VHF.
[End]
Stolen from ka7oei.blogspot.com