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Tuesday, January 16, 2018

The Beach 40 Chassis Transplant

Over the weekend I spent a bit of time carefully moving the innards of the double side band transceiver I built and place them into something a little more suitable. It was originally a plastice enclosure I found. The new enclosure will be a nice round cookie tin. This cookie tin should provide a decent amount of shielding against nearby interference. Especially since most of the gain is in the audio stage and is likely to pick up all manner of things nearby without it.

The cookie tin is a "Benton's Danish Butter Cookies" item that I bought for this purpose and maybe partially for the cookies. I like cookies. I bought it at the store Aldi. The container takes solder very well just as the Altoids containers do. I have not put labels on it yet and at the time I tried testing the receiver again the band was in poor shape due to an active geomagnetic field.

I have had some trouble nulling out the carrier completely with my mixer circuit. I will look into this more but I think it is fairly sufficient for where it is at right now. 

For a future project I am considering building a simple interface to try digital modes with this. It should be fairly straight forward to do. 

Below you will find a picture of the almost finished transplant:

Cookie Tin Radio. -AC9LF

Here's a quick video of the radio receiving a contest station:



Again, a special thanks goes to VK3YE, Peter for the Beach 40 and his videos.

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1 comment:

  1. UnknownMay 29, 2021 at 2:31 AM

    I am glad I found your page. I am building a Beach 40 right now. I received a station in Bulgaria tonight on it. He was coming in so good I had to cut my Kenwood on and work him. I also plugged it into the laptop to decode some ft8. I had to cut the mic gain in the laptop down really low. The LM386 is a little too much amplification for it. I was receiving stations all over Europe and picked up one in Australia. I am being overpowered by a local AM station really bad. I built an AM Broadcast band filter into the circuit. I also am using an external one for an SDR radio and I'm still getting some bleed through but it is much improved. Hopefully getting it into the case and some grounding will help. If not I'm going to have to come up with a better filter. I started out with a salvaged 7.2 MHz crystal from a VCR for the oscillator but now I am using the QRP Labs VFO kit. I received from 10 MHz on down to 80 Meters. Also I built the majority of this radio with salvaged parts from old circuit boards. In fact I saw you mention using toroids out of a computer. My AM Broadcast filter has 2 out of a computer I wound myself. I look forward to seeing more about your Beach 40 and reading about your other projects. 73, Chris de KI4RVH

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