ICOM AH-4 Automatic Antenna Tuner modification for RVSU

The Spring is here full power so is the war just North of Romania so our Emergency Communication Team (RVSU) is preparing for... field day!

Our standard in HF EmComms are ICOM radios and ATU's; we are using IC-7100 as our main HF radio paired with T2FD antennas for NVIS and AH-4 with verticals and wires for various Long Range HF.

In this post I will briefly show one modification for the AH-4 Automatic Antenna Tuner (one of the best in my opinion, for 100W output power).

It consist in changing the way the Coaxial RF cable and the Control cable are connected.

Because our concept is based on modular kits, the AH-4 must be able to be installed quick, reliable and we must have provisions to modify the setup if the field conditions required so and this must be done by operators with minimal training.

The standard ICOM AH-4 box include, among other things, a 10m LMR coaxial cable and 10m of 4 wire control cable terminated with the infamous MOLEX connector present in ICOM HF radios.

The way those cable connect to the Tuner box is pretty against "field use" principles therefore, a solution must be found.

After a few years of playing with my own AH-4, I concluded that it is not acceptable to open the case of the tuner anytime the cable must be connected or disconnected.

Another problem is the fixed lenght of the cables. Just 10m might not be enough in certain scenarios and while another coaxial can be added with the help of a female-female adapter, require intimate knowledge from the field operator and present some fatal risks for the integrity of the radio or the ATU if the wires are connected in the wrong way. 

So, another solution must be found!

We are not using the ATU in permanent setup so, some measure originally designed to prevent the water or moisture ingress can be reduced in order to accomodate some that can give more simplicity in installation and use.

First, the RF connector must be moved from inside the ATU to the outer case. 

The SO-239 (UHF-female connector) will be seated just where the cable clamp was. 

The connector is a good quality one, from Amphenol.

Unfortunately, the plastic will not support the mechanichal stress  of the connector so a small plate was cut from a piece of Aluminium.

Then, the ATU's case was prepared to accomodate the SO-239; the backplate was threaded for 3mm screws for better electrical contact.

Everything fits.

The lower left screw is longer. This is because there will be the Ground connection for the small piece of coaxial cable from SO-239 to the ATU's PCB.

This coaxial patch was made from some cable left from GSM sites and I know it can handle easy 100 W up to 100 MHz. So, I prepared it to be used here.

I removed the original piece of metal with the old SO239 and make some scratches on the Ground pad to install the coaxial patch.

I found a little piece of metal, soldered it onto a metal shield and put some heat shrink tube on it to fix the coaxial patch firmly in place:

Looks good and it is the time to take it to the next level: the control cable.

A few words about choosing the right cable:

In the field you need various lenghts of cables. Often those cables are cut, lost, or even forgotten at the base.

The ATU is drawing less than 1 Amp, typical around 200 mA. The control signals are at TTL logical level (5V) and the "protocol" is nothing more than pulling to ground or to +5V so nothing special with this cable must be observed.

Can be a cheap cable and it is desirable to be found easy. Long story short: what if I could use a FTP cable? Well, on my balcony I have an AH-4 which is connected to the radio with this kind of cable and for 2 years performed extremely well.

The problem with my AH-4 is that i modified it very ugly; the female RJ-45 connector is placed on a cut into the case and, believe me, it looks bad! 

In this case, I decided to use something that I already have in my junk box from a never-finished project. A RJ-45 female-male patch cable designed for panel mounting.

I was a little bit nervous because I thought the lenght of the patch cable was not enough to go from the upper case of the ATU to the PCB...

Checked and it was just the right lenght! So, I could start making the square hole from the round one!

... it fits now:

And this how it is. I put some hot glue to seal the holes but I forgot to take pictures...

At the other end of the control cable, a wall RJ-45 connector was tied to a MOLEX ATU connector. Fortunately, I bought some kits a long time ago so I could make it fast.

This is the electrical diagram for the RJ-45-MOLEX adapter:

... and this is how it looks:

Yes, I know, it's horrible but this is what I found at nearest store to me. I promise I will search for other solution but this is it, for now.

Now we can use (almost) any lenght of network UTP cable and (almost) any lenght of coaxial changing them in the field. And, if there is need for the network cable to our applications and no need for HF, we can use the cable for that purpose.

I hope this is an usefull ideea and will inspire other "brave hams"...

Some notes:

73 de YO3HJV, Adrian.

Xiegu G90 replacing 5V LDO with SMPS

Owners of Xiegu G90 knows the radio can get pretty hot just on receiving.

Looking inside the radio, on the lower board are two linear regulators.

One is a LM2940T which lower the power supply voltage down to 10 9V followed by a LM7805 which power all the logic circuits in the radio. So, there is a significant current through it.

The LM7805 is one of the worst linear regulators ever...

The thermal protection and short circuit are bad jokes. I never saw one to work!

Also they work hot and often need some sort of current limiter before.
Overall, bad choice from Xiegu.

I had some sort of DC/DC converters in my boxes and one of them in particular work pretty well and, BEING A BRAVE HAM, I thought, why not replace that piece of shit with one I already have?

The D-Sun DC/DC Buck converter is based on MP1584, a compact monolithic high frequency SMPS. In my particular case, the switching frequency is 1.5 MHz which can be conveniently filtered. Also, a major advantage is the overshoot protection which is essential when using it to power sensitive circuits.

The board have common negative ground so everything is OK from electrical perspective.

I test the dimensions and the little board almost fit into the slit of the PCB so I removed the LM7805. The removal was more like an extirpation as I removed it without lifting the lower PCB...

I used a little piece of sandpaper to fit the board, and i scratched a little bit the Ground around the SMPS board to add some capacitors.

After soldering the ground and before connecting the positive wires, I set my lab power supply to 10V and set the output of the SMPS precisely to 5V (actually, 5.002V, HI HI).

One concern was the conducted RFI from the converter so I added some capacitors to filter whatever ripple and noise the regulator is making; 150 nF, 1.5 nF and 150 pF on each side of the board.

Under the board I placed a piece of Kapton tape, just to be sure...

The photos are pretty self explanatory about how the things were done.

After this mod, the radio is much, much cooler; I will replace the LM2940 too, but I didn't find another SMPS. The other one will be place under this one.

Also, a nice result was that the current in Rx mode dropped from abt 650 mA to 520 mA. Probably will go further down with the LM2940 replaced.

I did a quick check in bands and no noise from the SMPS was found.

LATER EDIT.

I got another SMPS and I got into the radio one more time to change the 2940 too.

So, there are now two SMPS, first one is under the PCB and the second one is above the first. Here are the pictures:

The Rx current present now a significat drop.

With ATU:

Without ATU:

Xiegu G90 - backlight for Front panel keypad

There are not many features missing from the Xiegu G90... At least, when is about hardware, in the firmware, there is another story.

When I was replacing the STM32F103 in the front panel, I was asking myself if I can add backlight to the front panel keypad. At that moment I was focused on that repair job and I put the ideea on other shelf.

These days I will get involved into a big project and I will have to let down this kind of PMR (Pimp My Radio)  projects so I thought this is the right time to gave it a chance.

I have around some SMD LEDs and some ideea so, I get to the bench and opened, once more, the front panel assembly.

I did some tests about how the light is diffused in the rubber keypad and I investigated the places where I can put some LEDs.

The space between the PCB and the keypad is none so we need some alteration in the keypad rubber to accomodate the LEDs and the wires.

First try was with the tip of the soldering iron but, to my surprise, nothing had happened.

Then, I tried to use a 3.5mm drill to remove the rubber in an "organised" manner... nothing! The rubber act like rubber and get back into the hole.

Short story: I couldn't found the proper way to make 3mm holes with low risk of destruction.

The problem is that I must embedd not only LEDs but also the wires that goes to them. About the wiring, I had in plan to use 26 Gauge wrapping wire (around 0.5mm) so a proper way to make them too has to be found.

Here is the optimal position for a bunch of wide angle SMD LEDs to diffuse the light into the keypad.

NOTE 1: the botom line of keypad is already illuminated by the backlight from the LCD. Not very bright but enough to be seen into the dark.

NOTE 2: the colour of the LEDs has to be different than the two LEDs for Function and CW decoder because the light will be conducted in those too and will cause them to appear lit.

Xiegu G-90 Audio Gain for quiet nights

 I use to listen to CW to train the reception but not always I am not so willing to use the headphones. Sometime, late at night when I am working at some projects the sound can be heard in the bedrooms and I already had some complaints about this.

On Xiegu G90, the minimum audio level is still too loud for this and some faint signals need to keep the RF Gain at higher settings so something about the audio has to be done.

The audio volume is digitally defined into the audio codec in the Main unit and even I sent the issue to Xiegu, nothing has been done yet (FW 1.77).

Therefore, I felt I must do it myself...

The audio amplifier is made around a wellknown LM386 in SOIC package, not the best for thermal dissipation, if you ask me...

LM386 is a very versatile audio power amplifier designed to be used in portable applications. 

It feature a wide supply voltage range, between 4V and 12V (some versions from 5V to 18V), and can deliver 125 mW on 8 Ohm speaker with 0.2% distorsion.

Because it is designed for minimum external parts, it has an internal fixed value resistor (1.35 kOhm) for an amplification factor of 20.

Internal schematic of LM386:

This internal resistor can be bypassed with an external network to achieve higher gain (up to 200 or 46db) and Xiegu put there a 10uF capacitor and a 100 Ohm in series.

Sidenote: I found a nice online gain calculator for LM386.

The values used by Xiegu in G90:

According to the formula, the Gain is 124.5.

After tweaking with some Rext values, I replaced the original 100 Ohm with a 300 Ohm for a Gain of 76.

Now, the audio is pretty nice, the first step of volume settings is just where it should be for a quiet night.

Audio circuit, PCB layout in Xiegu G90:

Yeah, in the picture is the original resistor. I didn't take a picture after the mod :-( 

I played a lot there with various values for resistor and capacitor then i remind to take a picture. Well... please forgive me :-)

Xiegu G90 External Speaker modification

I like to hack the radios to add new features or to enhance the features already existing.

After playing a while with the G90 I found necessary to have an external speaker because the internal one, altough really loud, it lacks low frequency response.

Trying to connect an external communication speaker gone nowhere because the signal was too weak.

I do have some amplified speakers but I don't want to complicate the setup so, more gain was needed.

Therefore, I opened the Main unit of the radio and start looking inside.

To my surprise, the audio is routed from the LM386 audio power amplifier to the internal speakerphone or to external headphones  with a nice SMD relay. 

When the signal is going to the outside world (a.k.a) Headphones, a 100 Ohm resistor is in series with the HP which explain the low signal. 

I replaced that with 3 10 Ohm in paralell to have some sort of

load in case we shortcircuit the HP Jack. And this is very probable because the signal is going to the tip and to the ring of a stereo 3.5mm Jack. 

This is made to accommodate the usual Stereo Headphones every Chinese ham can buy from Shenzen.

Now the radio has external speaker without too much trouble. 

Because I am using modified Kenwood HS-5 Headphones the audio level is OK.

73 de Adrian yo3hjv @ December 2020