A Crowdfunded Si5351 Breakout Board From Jason NT7S

Followers of Jason NT7S’ blog “Ripples In The Ether” will know that he has been experimenting with the Si5351 chip.  This little $1.50 (or cheaper) device is a PLL clock generator which provides 3 independently programmable outputs from 8KHz to 160MHz. While it’s phase noise is not quite as good as the Si570 (the chip used as the frequency-determining element in the Elecraft KX3), it’s a whole lot cheaper, and indications are that it’s performance will be easily good enough  for many rigs. There was some talk over on the Minima mailing list about using it in a version of Farhan’s new open-source transceiver project, The Minima.  At less than $1.50 for the device, you can imagine how useful this could be as the frequency determining element in a whole new generation of QRP rigs.

Jason talks about it at length on his blog at http://nt7s.com/

Enter the Etherkit Si5351 breakout board –

An earlier version of the Etherkit Si5351 breakout board. The crowd-funded version will omit the broadband output transformers T1, T2 and T3 in order to keep costs down. (Photo courtesy of NT7S)

 

To make experimenting with this chip even more tempting, Jason is crowd-funding a run of these Etherkit Si5351 breakout boards. More details here. As this blog-post goes to press, the Indiegogo campaign, which was launched earlier today (Sunday) has already reached it’s minimum goal for funding. It runs until Feb 10th. Show your support for Etherkit!

Join Jason’s Indiegogo campaign here!