New Budget HF Upconverter Available

A new super budget HF upconverter has appeared over on cosycave.co.uk, a UK based trading site. It is currently priced at £9.99. The budget HF upconverter uses a 50 MHz oscillator and an NE602AN double balanced mixer and oscillator integrated circuit. It is only suitable for use on the R820T and is incompatible with the E4000.

This circuit appears to have no preselection or filtering circuits.

Budget HF Converter
Budget HF Converter
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GHK
#170571

Does someone know where to get these upconverters now? The link is not working anymore.

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Gordon
#32626

I got one of these today. I realise it isn’t going to work that well as it is, but I’m going to use mine as a base to experiment on. I’ll be adding some sort of front end filtering, and putting it into a metal RF case. The fun is in the experimentation. But I have very little components to build one from scratch.

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Mike
#32518

Dave
I can’t disagree with your comments except that I don’t have a well stock junk box like you so I would have to purchase the SA602, Oscillator and RF connectors so that’s half the cost gone.
I don’t think it’s a star performer. As I stated on the FB page I think the Cross Country Wireless up-converter is the best engineered up-converter. I though £10 for a bit of fun would be worthwhile and I don’t regret the purchase. If I want performance I use my HF transceiver.
I haven’t performed the Direct Sample mod but I may do that as a comparison. I have a E4000 dongle on the shelf that I could use.
I’ll also re-run the trial using a USB battery PSU to see what the effect is.
I next intend to feed the RF signal via an ATU to see what input filtering does to the chips overload properties.
I’m still happy with the £10 I spend as a hacker project

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Dave
#32045

 mike No offense, but have you used any other upconverter or performed a direct sample mod? Performance looks far from ‘great’ in the video, which isnt surprising since this seems to be a really badly designed upconverter. Even the PCB and soldering looks dodgy.

NE602/612 etc. is bad enough for this type of project even with an ideal design, but there is zero filtering of the noisy USB supply, zero filtering in the signal path, etc. I mean the price is low, sure, but why not just either build one for the $2 or so in parts or do the direct sample mod for free if the budget is that tight? Ugh not impressed at all.

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Mike
#31932

Purchase one on Friday. Arrived Saturday.
Great for general purpose HF listening.
Not suitable for LF reception.
Worth the money..
Two YouTube videos to watch

Mike
http://youtu.be/7DByRR4GOro
http://youtu.be/j-dfFiXxA7g

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