it looks like the German (and EU) customs is selecting out the Chinese Wlan Amplifiers. It gets more and more complicated to get it . Two of my orders never arrived and aliexpress dealers do not ship into the EU any more.
Whats still available on ebay is usually fake.
Do we need the Chinese ? No, we can do that by our own, and we can do better !
What about concentrating our knowledge to build our own QO-100 amplifier ? I cannot do it alone, but if we work together, we can succeed.
What I can do: PCB Layout, purchasing parts, manufacturing the prototypes
what is needed: experience designing 2,4 GHz circuits, calculating 2,4 GHz strip lines, designing snow flakes and similar. And we need someone with test equipment for 2,4 GHz who is able to test the prototypes (my instruments end at 1 GHz).
Some suggestions as a starting point:
available at Mouser and Digikey: the freescale MHT1008N
https://www.nxp.com/files-stat…c/data_sheet/MHT1008N.pdf
18,5dB gain and 12,5W max CW power. Would be a perfect match to the Amsat TX converter.
We could start with building the reference design from the data sheet, unless somebody has a better idea.
Using a Rogers PCB material the total cost of material could be < 50.- Eur (in qty of 20 or more).
I am not interested in any profit. If such a project generates a little profit we could give it to Amsat for their excellent QO-100.
So, thats my idea.
What do you think about it ?
vy 73
Kurt