{"id":1997,"date":"2015-07-22T08:39:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-21T22:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2015\/07\/22\/some-hb-ssb-history-the-belthorn-story\/"},"modified":"2015-07-22T08:39:00","modified_gmt":"2015-07-21T22:39:00","slug":"some-hb-ssb-history-the-belthorn-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2015\/07\/22\/some-hb-ssb-history-the-belthorn-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Some HB SSB History -The Belthorn Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Eden Valley, Cumbria, England<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n

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Hello Bill, <\/strong><\/div>\n
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As per your discussion with Pete in #177 I can indeed confirm that the correct pronunciation of Belthorn is \u201cBell-Thorn,\u201d like Bell and Thorn concatenated. I named the design the \u201cBelthorn SSB IF Module\u201d in honour of the village I was living in at the time I developed it. I wanted to put the village on the map and in doing so leave my mark. <\/strong><\/div>\n
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The design was published as a two part article in RadCom May\/June 2000 intended to offer an alternative to the Plessey SL600\/1600 IF strips of the late 70s early 80s. These integrated designs opened up simple SSB construction to many but by the mid 80\u2019s sources of SL600\/1600 ICs had all but dried up. I thought that a new design using readily available parts would be worth developing to offer a simple and repeatable basis for building an SSB transceiver. <\/strong><\/div>\n
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From the emails I\u2019ve received over the years it was and still is a popular project with many hundreds if not thousands having been built around the world. When the MC1350 IF amplifier became an endangered species I returned to the drawing board to produce a new version using a home brew diode DBM front end, a simple cascode IF stage and NE\/SA612 product detector\/modulator. An interesting feature of this was an AGC system based around an 8 pin 12F683 PIC. This new design offered considerable simplification and retained excellent performance. It was christened the \u201cEden SSB IF Module\u201d after the Eden Valley where I now live in the north of England. It formed part of a transceiver project published on Yahoo Groups (Search for Eden 9). The gentleman who created the Yahoo Groups site mistook my schematic revision number (9) to be part of the name, and so it unwittingly became Eden9!!! Fortunately the NE\/SA612 remains in production although should it become obsolete I would probably make things right by bringing out a yet another version of the IF strip, perhaps with a switching mixer. Here are a couple of links from the \u201cold world\u201d to give you a flavour of Belthorn the village and Belthorn the design;<\/strong><\/div>\n
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The village website –<\/strong>http:\/\/www.belthornvillage.co.uk\/<\/strong><\/a> (Note that they\u2019ve just bought a pub!)<\/strong><\/div>\n
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The origin of the name \u201cBelthorn\u201d is quite interesting \u2013 although of little relevance to radio! Before the industrial revolution the village used to be on a pack horse route. to this day there is a house at the top of the village called \u201cBell in the Thorn\u201d many years ago this used to be an inn. It\u2019s thought that it takes its name from when a Bell hung in a thorn bush or tree nearby was used to signal when a horse change over was required to carry loads up and down the hill, probably from the mines or quarries on the nearby moors.<\/strong><\/div>\n
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The link for the \u201cEden9\u201d which you may find interesting is; <\/strong>https:\/\/groups.yahoo.com\/neo\/groups\/eden9\/info<\/strong><\/a> There is a power point presentation in the files section which describes the project and which features a section on receiver design. It may be a useful primer for those interested in the design process.<\/strong><\/div>\n
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You can still find my original website on the internet archive complete with an introduction to Belthorn the village and a few of my earlier projects here; <\/strong>http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20090316093248\/http:\/\/g4gxo.cwc.net\/<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n
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73 Ron G4GXO<\/strong><\/div>\n

Our book: “SolderSmoke — Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics” http:\/\/soldersmoke.com\/book.htm<\/a> Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http:\/\/www.cafepress.com\/SolderSmoke<\/a> Our Book Store: http:\/\/astore.amazon.com\/contracross-20<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Eden Valley, Cumbria, England Hello Bill, As per your discussion with Pete in #177 I can indeed confirm that the correct pronunciation of Belthorn is \u201cBell-Thorn,\u201d like Bell and Thorn concatenated. I named the design the \u201cBelthorn SSB IF Module\u201d in honour of the village I was living in at the time I developed … Continue reading “Some HB SSB History -The Belthorn Story”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,23,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-radio-history","category-ssb","category-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1997\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}