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I have put my wspr beacon on the air for a test after the latest modifications. And so far it look promising.
Here is a picture of the mess 
Picaxe wspr beacon. Bottom: Picaxe and DDS-60 :Top from right: 10MHz LPF, tripler and amplifier for clocking the dds-60 @ 30MHz
Here is a small update regarding my band hopping picaxe controlled wspr beacon.
I took the beacon of air the other day to do some revisions to it’s circuitry. And in this context figured out that I was in need for a filter to clean up the square wave shaped signal from the 10MHz reference oscillator, the GPSDO MKII. I did a little googling and found an interesting circuitry drawn by Jerry Mulchin – N7EME. The reason for needing this filter is that I have a passive frequency trippler for clocking the DDS-60 @ 30MHz, and this tripler need a sine wave to work right.
There is still some work to be done before I can put the beacon back on air. But as they say in broadcasting; Stay tuned, will be right back after….
PCB measures 60x20 mm and parts are SMT
Schematics
Measuring reflection (S11) with the minivna. Return loss is more than 26dB @ 10MHz.
Measuring transmission (S21) with the minivna. 1dB insertion loss @ 10MHz and cout-off at 12MHz.
Been testing Opera for few days now. And I must admit there has been some head-scratching.
First of my microham digi keyer II which is hooked up with my TS-2000x did not produce much results. This duo works great in other modes but not with opera. I’m not sure what causes this but I suspect that my USB hub may be the problem. Anyway, I changed to my second digi keyer (mk1) and the FT-1000mp and the results began to show.
I have not yet enough experience to say anything about it’s ON-Air performance.
The software itself is very CPU hungry but this may me rectified (I hope) in later revisions. In fact new revisions are commeng all the time, sometimes several in a day.
Last night I tested for the first time the new weak signal beacon mode opera. It only ran for a few hours and I think there must be something wrong for I have had several clearly audible signals here but only one decode.
I will let it run through out the night to see if I can catch something.
Opera screen capture
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