{"id":3828,"date":"2017-04-28T10:38:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-28T00:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2017\/04\/28\/an-old-but-cool-difx-the-epiphyte\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T16:09:31","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T06:09:31","slug":"an-old-but-cool-difx-the-epiphyte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2017\/04\/28\/an-old-but-cool-difx-the-epiphyte\/","title":{"rendered":"An Old but Cool DiFX:  The Epiphyte"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"248\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5EApqkmrj3s?rel=0\" width=\"440\"><\/iframe><b><br \/><\/b> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>I&#8217;ve been hearing about this rig for many years. It first appeared in the September 1994 issue of QRPp, the journal of the NORCAL QRP club. A condensed version of that article appeared in SPRAT 81 (Winter 94-95). The designer is Derry Spittle VE7QK from Vancouver, British Columbia. <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>The name always puzzled me. Here is the explanation: It started with the Neophyte: A very simple direct conversion receiver that many of us built. The Neophyte was mostly an NE602 and an LM386. In the Epiphyte, a crystal filter and a second NE602 were added, turning the Neophytes into a superhet receiver and &#8212; with some additional circuitry &#8212; an SSB transceiver. The Oxford English Dictionary reportedly defines an Epiphyte as &#8220;a plant that grows on another plant&#8221;(see picture below). The Epiphyte grew out of the Neophyte.<\/b><\/p>\n<p> <b>And this plant grew in British Columbia, which seems &#8212; like Australia and New Zealand &#8212; to be fertile ground for simple phone rigs. I&#8217;m pretty sure the &#8220;Wee Willy&#8221; DSB rig also came out of BC, and it may have had a similar purpose: allowing for portable contact with the BC Public Service Net on 75 Meters. <\/b><\/p>\n<p> <b>There are many features of the Epiphyte that I like: There is a simple 455 kHz filter and a ceramic resonator BFO\/Carrier oscillator. The original design featured a VXO-like circuit using a ceramic resonator at 4.19 MHz. And it ran off AA batteries (as did the NE602 DSB rig I took to the Dominican Republic). <\/b><\/p>\n<p> <b>Unlike my NE602 rig, the Epiphyte made an artful use of the fact that NE602&#8217;s can be set up to have TWO inputs and TWO outputs. Where I used DPDT relays to switch inputs and outputs from both NE602s, OM Spittle left all the inputs and outputs connected, and simply switched the VFO and BFO signals. Ingenious. <\/b> <\/p>\n<p> <b>There were updates and improvements. The Epiphyte 2 and 3 featured increased power out (5 watts vs. 1 Watt). Version 3 has an IRF-510 in the final, driven by a CA3020A chip. That chip is capable of 70 db gain. Wow.<\/b> <\/p>\n<p> <b>In 1996 NORCAL and G-QRP donated 50 EP-2 kits to radio amateurs in third world countries. Very nice.<\/b> <\/p>\n<p> <b>In 2000 NORCAL did a kit of the EP-3 &#8212; it sold out in 24 hours. Here is a nice article on the EP-3: <\/b><br \/> <b><a href=\"http:\/\/www.norcalqrp.org\/files\/Epiphyte3Mnl.pdf\">http:\/\/www.norcalqrp.org\/files\/Epiphyte3Mnl.pdf<\/a><\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>And above we have a video from Japan of an EP-3 in action. <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b>  <\/p>\n<div class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/EpipthyicOrchids.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" height=\"400\" src=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/EpipthyicOrchids.jpg\" width=\"307\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p> <b><br \/><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been hearing about this rig for many years. It first appeared in the September 1994 issue of QRPp, the journal of the NORCAL QRP club. A condensed version of that article appeared in SPRAT 81 (Winter 94-95). The designer is Derry Spittle VE7QK from Vancouver, British Columbia. The name always puzzled me. Here is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2017\/04\/28\/an-old-but-cool-difx-the-epiphyte\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;An Old but Cool DiFX:  The Epiphyte&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,64,35,75,23,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-canada","category-clubs","category-direct-conversion","category-japan","category-ssb","category-superhet-receivers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3828","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=3828"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3830,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3828\/revisions\/3830"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}