Bad Case of the DTs PCB


Posted on Feb 6, 2014

Circuit Fear not, dear reader - I haven`t given up the sauce. I am not in withdrawal, suffering severe autonomic instability. I refer not to Delirium Tremens, but to time differences, dt. Specifically to the `DT` data column in the WSPR GUI. Everything was going FB with the multi-mode beacon and its new internal DDS until Thursday, when I started


Bad Case of the DTs PCB
Click here to download the full size of the above Circuit.

to notice large (and apparently random) timing errors. You can see the fall-off in performance on Thursday in this plot of the number of spots in each 24 hour period over the past two weeks. Eventually I discovered it was caused by some kind of interaction between the new Controller board and DDS and the main VXO system. The interaction was either conducted through ground, power lines or interface lines or through radiation from clocks, RF sources etc. Whatever the cause, simply un-plugging the controller (and reverting to the SDR Kits USB synth ) has cleared up the jitters for the moment. I had so much fun with building the DDS board in surface mount technology that I decided to stick in the nano scale and got some tiny tactile momentary action switches from Farnell (seen here against a PIC 16F873 for scale). . a conventional layout in which columns of switches are sequentially pulled low by pull-down transistors (in this case MMBT3904s - the surface-mount version of my beloved 2n3904) and read in "rows". I arranged two columns of three switches - four "arrow" keys to navigate up/down, left/right and two (as yet) un-designated switches. The actual software interface to the keypad is simple enough - the only real issue being the optimisation of the delays and rules for switch de-bouncing. I tested for two consecutive valid "reads" of the same key, separated by a small delay and then imposed another delay before looking for...




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