Quick update on the 630m project. I haven’t had the chance to finish the power amplifier for the 630m project yet, but I stumbled across an old Aliexpress 2W broadband amplifier I bought many years ago. I hooked it up, just for fun, just to see what happened. And wow, it works!

Now, I have to pretend being a responsible adult for a second, and stress that the tests I did weren’t done on the 630m band. Yeah, sorry.

I still don’t have an appropriate antenna for it yet, but since the curiosity got the best of me, and given the fact that the Si5351 can generate clocks anywhere between 8kHz and 160MHz, it was easy to change the output frequency to something supported by my existing antennas. The lowest SWR on my vertical is on 17 meters, so I reconfigured the base frequency to be 18.070 MHz.

I tried calling but, to my disappointment, no RBN nodes picked me up. Crap.

Well, I had to check one more thing: my club have two remote stations nearby, maybe I could hear something there? And sure enough, hell to the yeahs! Loud and clear, 5NN, on 17m!

I can live with that for now, while continuing the world’s slowest amplifier build ever in recorded history.

This got me thinking, though. Maybe this project should support more bands than just 630m alone. This requires multiple and separate waveform smoothing and low-pass filters but… maybe it’s worth the effort. At least for one or two additional bands.

Next update will be focused on the power amplifier part, I promise.