Sunday, December 12, 2010

One way to get signals to jump out...........

LP-PAN
Preamp kit
Some time ago I added a pan adapter to my station it has been and still is a very useful tool. It's a great advantage to have an overview of a particular band. It's a fast way to see if a band is open or closed, how busy the band is and where the signals are. This saves a lot of time tuning up and down looking for signals, you just click from one to the next. It's a great advantage during contests. There are lots of  pan adapters on the market today I happen to choose the LP PAN from Telepost by Larry N8LP. The LP-PAN can be purchased as a kit or fully assembled. I chose the kit, it goes together very well. Larry is always very prompt with his emails back to you if there are any questions.  Larry also is always looking for ways to improve his products, recently he introduced the LP-PAN add on preamp kit. This kit will help at improving the noise floor of the pan-adapter display allowing weaker signals to be seen that were not seen before.  The instructions were very easy to understand and again if in doubt Larry is just an email away. Once the kit is together and installed just some minor setup is required. As for how it works....the kits does what Larry says it will do. After installing the kit and viewing it in the PowerSDR software there are signals that show up that otherwise would had been lost in the noise floor. Below there are pictures of the build, the finished product and a view of the PowerSDR software display before and after the kit was installed.
Finished Preamp

New hole drilled and kit installed
Kit installed in Pan adapter

Signals on pan-adapter before mod was done some signals are mixed in with the noise floor
Signals after the mod it shows less noise  and more signals are apparent out from the noise floor.

1 comment:

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Hi Mike, interesting equipment. It shows what is possible these days. The PAN adaptor saves a lot of time indeed, would be excellent for me. Though I just read on the telepost website it is for webSDR, Elecraft and some expensive Yaesu and Icom radios. I think you need a special IF out connection on your radio. Well, I think I´ll condemned to turn the dail to find out if there is propagation. Anyway, it´s nice to see it works very well on your side. 73, Bas