AO40 The Easy Way by VK3CJS

With a little care and patience it is possible to lift signals another 2 to 3 s-points out of the crud. First a little theorising about the design of the downconverter. The first clues come from the excellent web pages of Kerry, VK1KRF. Kerry shows the passband of the Conifer HERE.

With his information, I dismantled the beast and studied it under the big magnifier. It seems to be two converters with a common preamp, L.O. and I.F. preamp. The range 2050 to 2100 mhz is converted to VHF while the range 2300 to 2400 is converted to UHF.

Through connections

Try downloading this page and see if you can blow up the picture. It was made with an office scanner and the original is surprisingly good. This may be a good way of augumenting crappy eyesight when examining surface mount circuts.