At the end of last month we posted about Milan’s work on using an Si535A voltage controlled oscillator with breakout board as a stable replacement for the default RTL-SDR’s low quality 28.8 MHz local oscillator.

Now in order to reduce the number of spurious signals produced at multiples of 28.8 MHz by the external local oscillator, Milan has added a simple low pass filter to the oscillator output. He used a 3-pole Butterworth filter with a 30 MHz cut off point. This filter acts to the convert the Si535A’s square wave output into a sine wave, which should help reduce the number of spurious signals produced.

Milan tested his filtering by creating a wideband comparison sweep with rtl_power. With the low pass oscillator inserted, the spurious signals were clearly reduced a significant amount. Then by reducing the drive level from 8mA to 2mA, the spurious signals were reduced even more. By using a filter with more poles it’s possible that the spurious signals could be reduced even further.

With most low cost RTL-SDRs the provided 28.8 MHz local oscillator is of low quality and will often have a sizeable frequency offset and temperature drift. To fix this the oscillator can be replaced with a higher quality one.

Over on his blog Milan has showed how he used a Si535A voltage controlled oscillator on a breakout board from etherkit.com to replace the RTL-SDR’s low quality oscillator. The Si535A is a clock generator circuit which is capable of generating almost any frequency up to 200 MHz with 0 ppm offset from a 25 MHz TCXO oscillator. To connect the Si535A break board to the RTL-SDR, Milan soldered an edge mounted SMA connector to the RTL-SDR and connected it to the RTL-SDR’s clock input with a 10nF capacitor.

Milan also writes how the Si535A has options for different drive currents and writes that by lowering the drive current from 8 mA to 2 mA the spurious signals found at multiples of 28.8 MHz in the RTL-SDR are reduced. He also writes the the Si535A also allows you to detune the frequency a bit which can help to tune around any spurious signals. This could be useful for example when using rtl_power as you could create a spurious free plot.