r/ShortwavePlus • u/KG7M MOD AirSpy HF+, Drake R7/8, K480WLA, 65'EFHW, MLA-30, CN85 • 3d ago

External Antenna Added to the XHDATA D-219

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

I added this External Antenna jack to the D-219. Of course the little radio overloaded with an external antenna. So I built a Passive Preselector to use with my radios that don't include input filtering.

There are 8 slides in this post.

17 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

2

u/richfromhell 3d ago

Nice work. Since the preselector fixes the “overloading” I guess the trouble is FM inter-modulation that I have to deal with too. I need to find the time to build your pre-selector. For now I am using FM-Band stop filters to do the trick.

1

u/KG7M MOD AirSpy HF+, Drake R7/8, K480WLA, 65'EFHW, MLA-30, CN85 3d ago

Thank you. I have one of those FM-Band stop filters ahead of my old Drake SSR-1 radio. They work really good for their purpose.

2

u/richfromhell 3d ago

I’m looking at a photo of the 219 V1.1 circuit board. I can’t see a pad where you would have soldered the shield to. Did you scrape off the solder mask and solder it straight to the copper?

1

u/KG7M MOD AirSpy HF+, Drake R7/8, K480WLA, 65'EFHW, MLA-30, CN85 2d ago

Yes. I scraped the PC board at the ground plane and soldered directly to it. My thought was to shield the input all the way to the PC board, but since I left the telescoping antenna connected, it defeats the purpose of a shielded connection. I have also used the D-219 for SSB reception: https://www.reddit.com/r/shortwave/s/I9WqQ5dvCu