Kuhne Electronics IC7300 IF Transverter Mod Board

While building the Iceni 70cm transverter I thought of combining the separate TX and RX IF's with either a simple resistive Wilkinson combiner or using a lumped component Wilkinson.

But the guys at Kuhne Electronics however do a simple mod board consisting of a couple of relays and diodes and a single resistor which will give separate TX and RX IF outputs so I bought the mod board to try it out.  The beauty of this method is there will be no attenuation loss in the RX path.

The supplied PCB looks to be good quality though the connectors are RCA phono sockets and it would have been nice to have BNC's instead, the only other thing that would have been nice is an adjustable attenuator on the IF out as according the Kuhne the IF output will be about 25dBm and Sam's transverters require 0dBm.

The board itself took 10 minutes to construct having so few components.   I've yet to fit it but that just involves making a couple of coax tails made out of 35ohm 3.6mm rigid coax which plugs into the IC7300 RF unit and then soldered to the Kuhne IF board once the right length has been determined.

The board sits between the RF PCB and PA PCB.  When the mod board is activated it provides a 50ohm load on the PA input while passing the feeds from the RF PCB out to the transverter.

The board operates by supplying 12V to switch the relays.   I'll update the blog once I tried the board out.

Kuhne Electronic IC7300 IF break out board.