{"id":5055,"date":"2012-12-23T21:07:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-23T10:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2012\/12\/23\/woe-is-me-why-podcast-is-late-parasitic-oscillations\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T18:17:01","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T08:17:01","slug":"woe-is-me-why-podcast-is-late-parasitic-oscillations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2012\/12\/23\/woe-is-me-why-podcast-is-late-parasitic-oscillations\/","title":{"rendered":"Woe is me! Why Podcast is Late: Parasitic Oscillations!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I’m building my FOURTH JBOT and this one is giving me more trouble than all the others combined. <\/span>
Here are the details of my tale of woe:<\/span>
20 meter rig. Double Sideband. The JBOT is fed by a simple two-diode, trifilar toroid singly balanced modulator. NO DIPLEXER TO SPEAK OF. At the output of the balanced modulator there is a 1000 uH choke to ground and a .001 uF cap to the input of the JBOT. AF amp is an LM-386. VXO is a very simple MPF-102 one stage ceramic resonator VXO with no buffer stage. 7 element low pass filter (three coils, four caps). <\/span>
All the transformers are wound on FT-37-43 cores. T3 is four such cores stacked 2X2.<\/span>
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The arrangement works beautifully into a 50 ohm dummy load. But as soon as I connect it to an antenna (a dipole out in the yard, fed with 50 ohm coax) the output signal gets ugly. <\/span>
Looking at it on the scope, instead of the nice figure eight pattern (similar to the two tone test pattern of SSB) I get ugly fuzzy outcroppings from the peaks. Looking at the signal more closely I can see that in addition to the 14.2 Mhz signal, there is another LF oscillation at around 250 kHz. <\/span>
I’ve been struggling with this. I can’t get rid of the LF oscillations. The leads are all short and the inputs are far from the outputs. I’ve beefed up shielding, and decoupling. I’ve sacrificed a chicken to Papa Legba. Nothing seems to help. <\/span>
I THINK the feedback\/oscillation is taking place in the JBOT itself — not through the<\/span>
audio amp or the balanced modulator or the VXO.<\/span>
I watch the RF and the AF inputs to the balanced modulator to see if there is any difference between the stable situation (with the 50 ohm dummy load) and the unstable situation (with the antenna), I don’t see any differences. <\/span>
I even put an antenna tuner between the final and the antenna anb made sure that the antenna looks like 50 ohms non reactive. This seems to help a bit, but the ugly instability is still there. <\/span>
Help me! <\/span>
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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><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m building my FOURTH JBOT and this one is giving me more trouble than all the others combined. Here are the details of my tale of woe:20 meter rig. Double Sideband. The JBOT is fed by a simple two-diode, trifilar toroid singly balanced modulator. NO DIPLEXER TO SPEAK OF. At the output of the balanced … Continue reading “Woe is me! Why Podcast is Late: Parasitic Oscillations!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,235,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dsb","category-jbot","category-troubleshooting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5055","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=5055"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5058,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5055\/revisions\/5058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}