The linearly biassed gates used to buffer the input of the Softrock LO fail at low frequencies, breaking up into spurious oscillations at the threshold changeover, not operating the divider properly  and hence giving an apparent change in freq  I had this problem  when I was using a "Finningley Dongle" driven by an external DDS source.   The solution was to add my own Schmitt trigger input buffer before letting it get to the 74HC74 device.   That way  it would work down to below 10kHz RF input.

Andy  G4JNT

On 26 January 2018 at 15:06, David Bowman <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi Chris.

It may be worth going back to the oscillator and making sure the frequency there is what you expect.

Could be that the divider is working fine, but the input to it is shifting around.

73

David  G0MRF

On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 1:45 PM, Chris Wilson <[email protected]> wrote:

Hello  LF and VLF folk!

I have built a couple of Softrock Lite II IF frequency receivers,
normally they would be used to view another receiver's IF on a
bandscope, but popularly they are also used on low and medium
frequencies as stand alone SDR receivers. The MF one works fine. Th LF
one was intermittent, then failed with high current draw. I isolated
it to a faulty or shorted divider chip. The original one was marked
78C49NM. I couldn't find one of those, so plumped for one from RS
Components here in the UK, a CD74AC74M96G4, RS part number 662-6939
The oscillator worked on the bench and from an xtal frequency of 461.5
kHz gave the expected divide by 4 output of 115.364 or very close.
Then suddenly it started receiving broadcast stations and the divided
outputs Q and /Q were on 153.814 KHz! There they remain. Fiddling I
briefly saw a return to 115.36 Khz, but it was not for long. All
voltages to it's pins are correct at 5V. I am not sure if it's a
faulty divider, or a bad connection or short.

Xtal case is grounded and seems stable. R16 in the oscillator changed
on advice from 22.1k to 10k as they apparently tend to stop running
with 21.1k there. I attach the schematic. Wrong IC? Details of the
divider's operation are at http://www.wb5rvz.org/softrock_lite_ii/03_div

The new IC details are at https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/flip-flop-ics/6626939/

I see these frequencies on these pins:

Pin 3 : 464.444 kHz

Pin 11 : 464.444

Pin 12 : 153.814

Pin 8 : 153.814

Pin 2 : 307.625

Pin 2 : 307.625

Is this a random IC fault or does it have some mathematical
correlation? My maths is pitiful!

Not sure what to do now, I have another IC but before risking pad
damage thought it prudent to ask, many thanks.

Pins 14 and 2 on the mixer IC show good, 90 degree out of phase square
waveforms of normal amplitude on a scope, but at 153.814 KHz....

Schematic is at http://www.gatesgarth.com/schematic.jpg



--
Best regards,
 Chris                          mailto:[email protected]