

Jeff Del Papa on Laser And Webcam Team Up For Micron-Resolution Flatness Measurements.Posted in Radio Hacks Tagged digital display, dx-160, frequency counter, frequency display, IF, radio shack, shortwave, VFO Post navigation Of course, another answer would be to replace the VFO completely, but that would negate the cool old dial. We have to admit that while we enjoy old radios, we also enjoy a digital display. There, are, however, a variety of methods. A common trick is to count the number of zero crossings over a period of time and scale to how many you would have in a second. Some have dedicated hardware for this purpose. If you don’t want to use an off-the-shelf display, it is pretty easy to count frequency with most microcontrollers.

design uses a capacitor to couple the oscillator’s energy into the counters. The real trick to the project is finding a place to tap the VFO frequency and then doing so in a way that doesn’t kill the oscillator or introduce instability.

The displays draw power from the radio’s lamp sockets. They are cheap, so why not? The displays are configurable, so you could probably work out a way to use one even if you had to manually throw a switch to do it. With a microcontroller you could deal with this easily, but solution was to simply use two displays.
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As it turns out, this radio has some bands that tune to the VFO’s frequency minus 455 kHz and some bands tune to the VFO frequency plus 455 kHz. Today, a cheap digital display will do fine. In this receiver’s heyday, this would have been a formidable project. If you can find a place to tap the VFO without perturbing it too much, you should be able to pull the same stunt. In this case, the radio is a single conversion superhet with a variable frequency oscillator (VFO), so you need only read that frequency and then add or subtract the IF before display. Finding an exact frequency was an artful process of using both knobs, but decided to refit his with a digital frequency display.Įven if you don’t have a DX-160, the techniques uses are pretty applicable to old receivers like this. The radio looked suspiciously like the less expensive Eico of the same era, but it had that amazing-looking bandspread dial, instead of the Eico’s uncalibrated single turn knob number 1 to 10. If you spent the 1970s obsessively browsing through the Radio Shack catalog, you probably remember the DX-160 shortwave receiver.
