2020-02-25

Second Crystal/Ceramic Resonator Tester. Update

I built a second crystal tester today. This time I used 470pF capacitors for the Colpitts oscillator "resonating capacitance", and a larger transfer capacitor.
As expected, this worked nicely with ceramic resonators (but not 3-pin filters) down to the lowest available, 400kHz, and up to about 2MHz (crystals). One 1843kHz crystal did not work, but a 1963kHz crystal did. Maybe the 1843 crystal was poor quality.

I expect that I should build the third one of of the crystal testers, this time with 100pF "resonating capacitance". This **should** provide tests the intermediate frequency range of 1.8 - 8MHz, at least for crystals and ceramic resonators.

All in all I am happy with the results, I was warned that the crystal tester kit, advertised as 1 - 50MHz crystal tester, was not working in the full range, so I had a few kits taken home.

I could see that one of the ceramic resonators (marked 480kHz) oscillated on 476kHz, i.e. inside the 630m band. I suspect that I can build a VXO with one of those resonators, covering the full 472 - 479kHz band. Oops ! Yet another possible project to try out. Maybe a modified Pixie kit can be brought to work on 472kHz - I would not be surprised.

Update:
A third version with 2x 100pF in the Colpitts oscillator was built. This appears to work nicely from 2 - 16MHz with crystals.
Ceramic resonators:
- The 3.5 - 4MHz range works well with some resonators, no filters.
- The 7.16MHz (3-pin) oscillates nicely just under 7MHz with the capacitors in the oscillator.
- 12MHz resonators oscillate fine.
- 5.5MHz filters do not oscillate at all.

My conclusion is that the three testers combined will provide some crystal and ceramic resonator/filter tests, but a dedicated (set of) oscillator(s) and a dedicated frequency counter with high impedance/low capacitance input is most likely necessary for a better test system.


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