Last night I visit a keynote from Bas PE1JPD about his 23cm transceiver kit at our local HAM-club evening. It was a very good keynote. Bas was able to find a very good balance between speed and technical depth. He took his listeners from the beginning of design thru prototyping and the final kit. His remarks about the bugs he found (and how he solved them) where hilarious. Bas used very professional slides in his presentation to illustrate the various parts of the schematics. From his answers to questions of the public you could tell Bas really understands designing kits and made really solid choices in this 23cm transceiver kit.

I was so enthusiastic, immediately ordered one. I’m not that much of a 23cm fan but I like this project so much already. I really want to reward the effort Bas put in it.

The 23cm transceiver kit is build around a very smart PLL-solution. Receiver and transmitter share the same intermediate frequency. A cheap Atmel processor is used to control the whole 23cm transceiver kit. A standard 2×40 character with a rotary encoder is the interface.

It is a simple kit which does 23cm FM-only. The idea behind it is to have a pretty straightforward kit with low priced, good available parts.
Bas has prepared a kit with a professional euro-card (10x16cm) circuit-board, all parts and a display. All you need to do is find a case, a speaker and a mic and you are ready to go. The kit price is 142,50 euro’s which is a really sharp price for what you get.

This keynote was outstanding, I wish more people used it as example to model their keynotes. I hope Bas will do this keynote again for other clubs. Maybe the 23cm band will be very crowded, thanks to his project!

More news on the building process the coming months on this blog.