WTD: WWVB receiver

On Mar 14, 9:07 am, Jim Thompson wrote: > Anything wrong with these........ >

A year and a half back I contacted Galleon about the modules. They offered a development kit of the receive module and antenna for $60

GG

Yes, and most of these hits are hit like this newsgroup.

Everyone like to talk about it, but few have any usefull information.

:-)

This is what they sent me:

Qty Qty Qty Qty Product Code Samples 100+ 1,000+ 10,000 Antenna FTM 02010-WWVB 27 10 6.84 call EM2s FBM 02010-WWVB 47 29 24.85 call MCM RS232 FBM 04000-WWVB 49 33 28.47 call

All prices are USD.

It must be possible. I remember a very detailed cost study in the 90's to show the efficiency of the Chinese electronics mfg marketplace. The "corpus delicti" was a fax machine that was calculated to come in under $10 in production and it had a single-line LCD module that was connected via a very skinny ribbon.

BTW I also parted out a single line LCD module from a speaker phone that had cost 30 Deutschmarks. Ok, not quite $10 but very close.

Yeah, I remember those practical parallel ports and game ports. Useful for a lot of EE tasks but now all gone :-(

I've played with this a bit.

You might be able to get by with a few dozen turns of wire, resonated at 60HKz with a 0.082 capacitor, , couple of op-amp stages, separated by 60KHz xtal filters.

Digi key has 60.000 and 60.0002 xtals for a song. You need the .002 variety for the series elements.

The xtals are a bit too sharp, with a bandwidth under 0.2 Hz. You need to dsign in a lower Q quite a bit to get the data to come through!

Drill a hole in the can to air damp the crystal. Should be enough.

Maybe that is because there aren't any cheap modules?

Parallel ports for "general purpose I/O" were never very good, in my experience. Back in the DOS days, sure, but by the time PCs were running Real OSes (roughly Windows NT onward, or OS/2 or Linux), getting some hacked together I/O going through the parallel port would no longer count as a particularly "clean" solution in my book. Plenty of engineering time was wasted over the years trying to get, e.g., dongles working with printers, parallel port scanners or zip drives behaving, PROM programmers from the DOS days working under Windows 95 (I was bit by that one), etc. (Although I will say I thought the Iomega "adapter" dongle that went from a parallel port to their SCSI Jaz driver was pretty slick, and always worked quite well for me.)

These days you can get plenty of USB interface "boxes" for

Oh! Clever!

But is that limited to crystals that vibrate in a certain mode, with the ends flapping? In a compresion mode, uninformed intuition suggests the effect of air might be negligible. What a fun thing to explore when one gets a free minute.

Just watch out that the school buses get re-routed so the amount of soot getting in there is limited. Else you'll have to train some ants who periodically clean in there with Windex ;-)

Worked like a champ with plain old traditional quartz crystals.

Q dropped from something like 6000 to 1000.

Naturally, you solder or epoxy the hole after removing the vacuum and storing it elsewhere.