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Inexpensive Composite-output Source?

D

Doctor_Technical

I am in search of an inexpensive -- and small -- FM tuner from which I can pull a composite output, and would welcome any leads.

Both Dayton Industrial and Rolls make obvious candidates, but I am looking for something between one of their products and just ripping open a Sony pocket radio (SRF-M37?) and hunting around for the discriminator.

I have two uses in mind: one is a portable and tunable FM demodulator that I can toss into my spectrum analyzer kit in order to provide a quick-and-dirty "sanity-checker" composite source (the Sony might work just fine for this); the other would be to use a device that is more of a fixed frequency design to serve as the front end of a "micro-peater", for cases when I am in a building basement or other reception-challenged areas.

Any ideas? Thanks!

Paul E. Burt
Baton Rouge, LA
 
Dayton makes a one rack-unit tuner with composite output. Not really a very good tuner for the price, it is not very sensitive. I have one feeding a translator, but it is marginal in that use. Luckily, the equipment is inside a studio/rack room, not sure how well it would function in the typical transmitter site location with lots of temperature variation.

I gather by "small" you are thinking portable radio, cigarette-pack size. Haven't come across anything like that; and I suspect you would then need an out-board amplifier to have enough level to properly drive the typical exciter input. If you could get at the composite signal at all, the way most radios are designed now. Years ago I pulled composite audio out of a Pioneer hi-fi receiver with some success, but that receiver has a real IF strip with separate detector stage. Not the one-chip wonders we have now. (The 30 year old receiver still works fine, albeit with noisy volume controls--it's sitting on a file cabinet in my home office as I type.)
 
An engineer friend of mine used to work on Pioneer units in the 80's. He still has quite a number of 1980 units. Those things had incredible tuner sections, including a workable mpx output.
 
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