Board Availability

[acceler8]

Originally Posted by tubelab.com

It went through the USPS automated postal center this morning on my way to work. You should have it next week.

And indeed I received it today! Thank you very much! The quality of the board is very nice.

I seem to remember something on your website mentioning a burned CD of instructions. I didn't receive a CD, but it's entirely possible that I was reading something off a page that isn't relevant any longer. Should I have received a CD? If the CD is nothing more than the instructions on your website, then there is no need to bother. If, however, the CD has a large PDF with step by step instructions and full color photos; I may be interested in that

[nic6paul]

Originally Posted by acceler8

And indeed I received it today! Thank you very much! The quality of the board is very nice.

I seem to remember something on your website mentioning a burned CD of instructions. I didn't receive a CD, but it's entirely possible that I was reading something off a page that isn't relevant any longer. Should I have received a CD? If the CD is nothing more than the instructions on your website, then there is no need to bother. If, however, the CD has a large PDF with step by step instructions and full color photos; I may be interested in that

there is no cd. The instructions are on the site

[tubelab.com]

I designed the crystal oscillator core and the holdover circuit for that one. As well as a bunch of other circuitry.

I sit amongst a team of CMOS RF IC designers at work. Most of what they do escapes me. I take their chips and make prototype radios with them. The high spec radios we make can't be made with off the shelf chips, and none of the big chip companies want to design chips for our low volumes anymore (compared to the cellualr guys next door). Often I evaluate new chips in the market just to see what's out there, or to test wild ideas......

Thank you for your patronage...

I had a cool idea, which I explained to the sales engineer, and he provided the board for no charge so I cold try it. Think about this:

If you need a local oscillator for a high spec radio, you need super good phase noise, and a reasonable channel spacing (often a few KHz). In order to get the ultimate close in phase noise you need to run the phase detector at the highest possible frequency, say 100 or 125 MHz. Well, now the channel spacing is huge. The traditional solution is a Fractional N synthesizer and a very high spec VCO or bank of VCO's. I have been following the evolution of the clock gen / jitter cleaner IC's for a few years. So far none of them can perform this function.....yet

Lets say you take an LMK04808, set it up with a 0.5 ppm reference oscillator (I chose 26 MHz because its from a GSM phone and therefore cheap) in CLK0. The Crystek VCXO running the phase detector without division is the magic part for low phase noise, along with the maximum loop corner frequency. So far a common set up with a 100 or 125 MHz channel spacing.

So what if we set up one of the CLKouts to divide the internal VCO by 8 and feed it into the CLK input of a DDS chip or fractional divider. Take the output of the DDS chip and return it to CLK1in pass it through the FBmux, through mode mux3, and the N2 divider into the the phase detector for PLL2. For this large loop to lock the input to CLKin1 must be 100 (or 125) MHz. The DDS chip I have in mind can divide any frequency from 200 to 400 MHz down to 100 MHz in millihertz increments. This allows the main VCO to tune its entire range with very small step sizes.

I don't know if it will work but I intend to find out shortly.

[tubelab.com]

Should I have received a CD?

Sorry for the confusion. I offered a CD in the very beginning, but it was a direct copy of what's on the web site and not many people used them. As costs increased (the boards now cost more than twice what they did 6 years ago) and my time became more scarce. I kept my prices the same, and the CD went away.

My web site is a bit out of date, but technically correct. A new one is coming some day. It's mostly done, but legal issues force me to remove all traces of the word "Simple" used with the common abbreviation for "single ended". This requires re-doing a lot of pictures before publishing the site and I don't have the time now. The next batch of boards will be labled SSE. The other boards will be renamed too. The Tubelab SE becomes the TSE and the Simple P-P becomes the SPP.

[tomchr]

Originally Posted by tubelab.com

It's mostly done, but legal issues force me to remove all traces of the word "Simple" used with the common abbreviation for "single ended".

Say what? I'm curious here. I searched for "Simple" plus the common abbreviation for "Single Ended" and the only conflict I came up with was "Search Engine". So I'm guessing it's not a trademark issue... Would you mind elaborating a bit?

Originally Posted by tubelab.com

none of the big chip companies want to design chips for our low volumes anymore (compared to the cellualr guys next door).

Yeah, it all seems to be big volume, high price, high performance these days. Managers seem to have forgotten about the LM317's and LM741's of the world. They're still selling in volume. Very low ASP, but high volume. Those designs must have paid for themselves many times over.

LMK04800 + DDS... That's pretty cool. As long as the DDS has low enough noise floor and 1/f noise, I don't see any reason why that wouldn't work -- especially if you have some flexibility with the loop bandwidth of PLL2. I'm curious to hear how that works out.

~Tom

[tubelab.com]

So I'm guessing it's not a trademark issue... Would you mind elaborating a bit?

It is a trademark issue. A company engaged in the home theater business markets a multi room entertainment system that is called by the exact same name as my board without the space between the word "simple" and the letters "SE". Their name is trademarked. This came up about 3 years ago and was resolved amicably without legal intervention by making sure I never typed the words without the space.

Their market and the DIY audio market are not correlated, but it seems that people who build their own "audio system" or "entertainment system" tend to talk about them...a lot. Earlier this year Google changed something in their search engine so that it can see the directory structure of the files inside the server of my hosting company (and other servers as well). It seems that I had done a good job of removing all plain text instances of the offending words, but images and file systems still contain the words.

This went unnoticed for 3 years until something changed. The owner of the trademark became justifiably unhappy when you put their trademarked name into Google and the top 10 hits ALL point to something to do with my board. A big time law firm sent me letters of intent to squash me. Fortunately we talked things out since Tubelab Inc. has more debt than assets.

I have removed all traces of the offending word, yet I still show up in a search for their trademark, so I have renamed all 3 boards to remove the word "simple". The web site is being redone again to reflect the changes.

[VictoriaGuy]

Thanks, George.
I just added another company (Simplese) to my list:"Never do any business with the following:"

Free enterprise for the reading-challenged, indeed.
Back in the 'ole 20th century, there was a difference between 'Simplese' and SimpleSE. (Kinda like 'Siamese' and 'SiamESE'.) Not in Googleworld, Inc.

[tubelab.com]

First off I understand why they did what they did and they were totally within their rights to protect their trademark. If I was in their shoes, I would be pissed off too.

I just added another company.....

Not that too many DIYers would want to buy an amp, but I wouldn't cross these guys off the list. After all they could have squashed me like a bug on the windshield of a big law firm.....

I will reserve my "never do business" list for companies like AT&T and Bank of America. They worked hard to earn a spot on my list and on most of America's list too.


Please do not type these words together especially on this forum. Google sees all!

[rknize]

Well, at least I'm not in the top 10 ranking anymore....

[tubelab.com]

Well, at least I'm not in the top 10 ranking anymore....

Yeah, but still on the first page!