Hi folks, There are some inexpensive RF amplifiers available in the hobby market by various names. They may be called LNAs, if you consider 3 dB noise figure as low noise. I purchased two of them from Amazon from a seller called HiLetgo. However documentation is sparse and the design is not all that great. People have had frustrating experiences with this type of LNA. Information regarding power supply to this board is practically non-existent, with voltage suggestions ranging from 5V to 12V ! Some even obtained the "magic smoke". Nonetheless they are reasonably cheap and therefore modifications can be done to make them useful. Let us now take a closer look at the board. Figure 1. The amplifier without any modification. Fig.1 shows the board without any modification. There are two SMA connectors and provision to externally power the board. The active element is an MMIC, with N02 as the marking. Other users have identified the MMIC as INA-02184 from HP. It seems to m
Hello all, VUSDR is a popular TxRx SDR in India. Inspired by Peaberry SDR, it can also be used in Linux machines with Quisk as the software. In this post, I won't go into the details of configuring Quisk for normal SDR. Instead, assuming that it is already done, I shall go into the details of configuring it for digital modes especially configuring for WSJT-X for Ubuntu 16.04. As for normal Quisk configuration, I might blog about it in future. A word of caution ! These steps worked for me, but I cannot guarantee that they will work for you. So let's get started ! First download and install WSJTX from the following link. https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/wsjtx.html You can double click and install the .deb file or can use terminal to install. I used the following command to install it (remember to open a terminal and navigate to the folder where the .deb file is present before typing this command) sudo apt install ./wsjtx_1.8.0_amd64.deb Next step is to in