bitx: star wars lunch box

The bitx module now has its own enclosure: A star wars lunch box!

I didn’t change much about my original setup. I ditched the s meter and added a manual usb/lsb switch to the front panel.

The red knob is the power/volume pot. There is a headphone jack under the switch and the rotary encoder on the right.

On the rear panel, I added the antenna jack, a dc jack that supplies the 12 volts to power the module, and an optional set of binding posts to supply up to 25 volts for the power amplifier. The switch changes the supply to the power amp on the bitx board. I wont be using the higher power until I can add a larger heat sink to the IRF510 and possibly a fan. I did a quick test on the output using both settings and the default 12 volts puts out about 5 watts and with 25 volts, I measured about 25 watts.

Inside the lunch box, you can see the bitx module on the left and the vfo board on the right. The vfo is an SI5351 board with an arduino pro mini. The board also contains a LPF for the SI5351 output and a 5v regulator.

The blue tape on the right side is holding the mic preamp board, from one of my previous bitx posts.

So far, everything is working as it should. I still need to add a fuse to the power input, a mic jack for using an external input, and I will probably tweak the arduino code a little more. For now, I will leave the current arduino code below. Most of the code below is based on code from Jason Mildrum, NT7S, Przemek Sadowski, SQ9NJE, and Tom Hall, AK2B.