Haven't closely followed this thread, but here's a pretty easy to reproduce splitter, can't imagine the parts costing more than $10, if you're a decent scrounger even less:
http://wiki.contesting.com/index.php/VP6DX_receiving_antennas#Bandpass_filter-splitter Julius Fazekas N2WN Tennessee Contest Group http://k4tcg.org/ http://groups.google.com/group/tcg1?hl=en Tennessee QSO Party 1800z Sunday, September 4 until 0300z Monday, September 5, 2011 http://www.tnqp.org/ Elecraft K2 #4455 Elecraft K3/100 #366 Elecraft K3/100 #1875 --- On Wed, 8/24/11, Jim Brown <[email protected]> wrote: From: Jim Brown <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Topband: RF attenuators To: [email protected], "'TopBand'" <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, August 24, 2011, 10:05 AM On 8/24/2011 3:59 AM, Pete Smith wrote: > Do you have the capability to measure their response? If they claim > they are essentially flat down to 5 MHz, and they don't fall off a > cliff below that, they might be a useful alternative to homebrewing, > or certainly to the $30 Mini-Circuits splitter. I have some measurement capability, but with many other things on my plate, hesitate to repeat work that a very capable guy like Jack has already done. Although I haven't seen his data, I would certainly trust it, and would expect it to show degraded response and/or isolation outside the design range of the product involved, and for lower quality el-cheapo consumer products. One of the key advantages of the Mini-Circuits splitters is that they typically offer 20-30dB of isolation between outputs within their design range. No, I would not expect response to fall off a cliff at the lower frequency limit in a Mini-Circuit spec, but rather for performance to gradually decline at lower frequency. There are a few Mini-Circuits splitters, that for example, should still work on 160M, albeit with reduced isolation and/or degraded response. I have a 1x4 that I'm using to split my Beverages to two main K3 RX and one Sub RX, and a 1x2 that I'm using to split a 6M preamp to main RX and Sub RX. While I could split the preamp with a Tee, the splitter provides a lot of isolation, which has nearly eliminated the strong birdies I used to hear with both RX running when I used a Tee to split the preamp. I found all of my splitters at hamfests for a few bucks. 73, Jim K9YC _______________________________________________ UR RST IS ... ... ..9 QSB QSB - hw? BK _______________________________________________ UR RST IS ... ... ..9 QSB QSB - hw? BK
