Saturday, May 3, 2025

Playing with a new crystal filter

 I recently put together this board - I wanted a crystal filter that looked a bit neater than the one I built previously.  Here is the board and it's frequency response directly.




That is a lot of ripple, as the filter does not want to "see" 50 ohms.  The email from the vendor said that this has an approximately "native" impedance of 150 ohms.  So I made input/output transformers to get to approximately that.  Was better, but still a lot more ripple than I wanted.

I found this post talking about matching the impedance of the filter to fix the filter's response.  It didn't click at first exactly the procedure, but eventually got it.  Inserting a resistor in series with the filter increases the impedance it "sees", and the filter response adjusts accordingly.  So I made to little fixtures of sma connectors with an in-line potentiometer.  The only ones I had were 10k, so it was touchier than I'd have liked.  But found the impedance looked more like the 300-400 ohm range.  Note that the impedance the filter "sees" is the amount of inline resistance + 50 ohms (from the nanovna).





I made a new transformer that had a 7:20 turn ratio, and got a much better result.  (So far have only made one on the input, still using the lower-impedance 5:9 transformer on the output.)




The bandwidth is 3.8KHz at the moment.  I need to have a play with the other capacitors provided to get the value down to something better.  (This is why the caps are on there the way they are at the moment - to easily remove them to try others.)  


No comments:

Post a Comment