SI5351-B DDS VFO Radio Controller Prototype (An Overview)

[@g1fsh]

Hiya mate hope u are well? Nice board and its full of very nice ideas. Love the way you have developed it so that it can be used with other peoples projects its going to be interesting to see where it goes and see what other developers do with it. Thanks for sharing it John boy.

[@M0XFXUK]

I took the time talking to people to try and understand their requirements and tried to make the unit as universal as possible. There is still quite a bit of development work left to do but that being said it starting to come together. I am also looking at PMR applications. Gary, always a pleasure to hear from you and thanks for the comment.

[@samtempleman3820]

Not a clue any of that means but however brilliant work John 😀

[@charlieoscar09]

Brilliant work.....Thanks for taking the time with this project I think it's going to be very popular and I myself are looking forward to getting involved with this . Please keep up us updated. Cheers

[@M0XFXUK]

Hi Charlie, yes there some really interesting things coming out of this project. It's starting to come together, it would be great to get you involved and I will certainly keep you updated. The next video should be out this coming week and I have some really cool thing in the pipeline.

[@GeorgeEI7KO]

Nice work johnboy!

[@M0XFXUK]

Nearly there mate.

[@goradios21154]

very nice

[@toolmanchris]

Nice to see you back again John 👍

[@M0XFXUK]

And you Chris, you should see more videos in the near future. Best Regards

[@christopheriles1469]

Brilliant (as always) John!

[@tjecolab7912]

Another banger from John 🙏

[@johnwest7993]

I was wondering how I could put an old rock-bound 200 W tube forest service SSB rig on the nearby 80 meter band since it's a nice old boat anchor. I got an SI5351 bd to try to do the mod with, but it looks like you have already done most of the heavy lifting for the mod.

[@M0XFXUK]

Hi John, Yes I'm sure this would do the job nicely, it sounds like a great project and I too love the old tube gear. I wonder how close the radio is to the 80 meter band? The reason I ask, the 5Mhz WRC-15 allocation is a very interesting band and the transceiver may be able to cover both depending on the filtering arrangement. I am hoping to get these boards manufactured, however there is a little more development work left to do, that being said it's not far off. Keep an eye on the channel as there is some interesting stuff to come regarding this little board.

[@ddsvfo]

Nice board! Can we get them ship to U.S?

[@M0XFXUK]

Hi Toby, Yes mate, no problem shipping to the US. I am just about there with the design, I have a couple of things I want to add and I could do with some advice. I will ping you an email.

[@M0UAW_IO83]

Renesas chip, interesting choice, any particular reason for that?

[@M0XFXUK]

The first prototype I was used the ATMEGA328P but I soon ran into the limitations of the device. i.e. flash memory and RAM capacity and the fact it's an 8bit device. The new Uno R4 uses the Renesas RA4M, I have been playing with it and liked the performance also the fact that it has an onboard 12bit DAC, an internal clock and the direct USB support.The boot loader can be can be burnt via the USB which is a nice feature. On the downside many Arduino libraries are not compatible with the with the R4 as yet, but I have been modifying libraries to suit the R4, once I got past this I found RA4M to have really great perforce, very stable and the sample timings for the DAC are more than good enough for generating CTCSS and DCS tones. Being a 32bit device it handles floating point computation much better than the 8bit AVR. I guess time will tell, so far so good. Oh, I forgot to mention, the RA4M has a lot of assignable GPIO interrupts which is great for the rotary encoders.

[@SimjetAU]

Very nice project. Will you put out a kit or data and code etc ? I would be very interested in this for a couple of projects I have in mind. VK4KZK

[@M0XFXUK]

Thank you for your comment and interest in the board. Yes, I am planning to get these board manufactured and all the code I produce will be open source so people can modify and play around with it. The board is 100% compatible with the Arduino platform and I'm hoping developers get involved and write some cool code for this. Keep an eye on the channel as there's some interesting videos coming for this board.

[@bazzaar1869]

Um, so this is not actually a DDS signal generator.

[@M0XFXUK]

Hi apologies I have been busy with work commitments of late. Thank you for the comment. It's not designed as a signal generator per say but more of a local oscillator and if I am honest it doesn't really fall into the category of DDS regarding RF signal side of things as the clock generator is a PLL synthesised system and not a digital to analogue convertor. It does however; have DDS function from the MCU generating audio tones for CTCSS etc. Again if I am honest I have moved on from this project and I have been developing a more powerful version called the Band Surfer base around the Si5351B IC using the ESP32 S3.