After constructing a 40m wire dipole that works with my SDR setup, I needed to start working on a transmission system. At the heart of virtually any RF system lies a stable oscillator, and crystal oscillators are ubiquitous in many low-power (QRP) rigs simply because they are so stable. After some rough math and a lot of simulations in LTSpice, I came up with this design to give me somewhere around 7 dBm of power.
![](http://abrammorphew.com/notes/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/7MHz-VXO-Rev-B.png)
The first stage is simple Colpitts oscillator topology with a “bent” 7.03 MHz crystal resonator. The 30 pF variable capacitor (C1) provides around 2 kHz of tuning. The output stage is a common-collector (Q4) and emitter-follower (Q3) with a negative feedback loop. I forget exactly where I saw this configuration, but I thought I would try it out and see if it worked. As you might have guessed, the output is loaded with higher order harmonics resulting in a waveform that doesn’t resemble a sine wave at all. I made sure to include a simple second-order low-pass Butterworth filter on the output to filter the output.
![](http://abrammorphew.com/notes/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/VXO_ugly_build.jpg)
Pictured above is the ugly constructed version of the oscillator in all it’s dead-bug style. I built it on a scrap piece of double-sided FR4 and overall it’s performance came out fairly close to what LTSpice had predicted. I got around 6 dBm of output and the second harmonic is around 29 dB down (around -23 dBm). That’s not the cleanest of signals, but it’s about right for the filter. Below is the output shown on my HP 8595E spectrum analyzer.
![](http://abrammorphew.com/notes/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/VXO_fund_Pout.jpg)
For the next phase, I’ll likely be adding control of the oscillator via an ATTiny chip. This will give me the ability to automate on-off keying of the device turning it into a simple CW beacon. One thing that could be improved is the current draw (~40 mA) from the emitter-follower at Q3. Basically, it’s a class A amplifier so it’s not the most efficient design in the world, but it provides enough power for driving an ADE-1 and could run off a small solar panel if I wanted to use it in the field.