Homebrew Radio Development Platform

Most of my homebrew radio projects always end up devolving into a mess boards that are haphazardly soldered together, so I figured it’s time to change that.

I’ve been re-watching some of Charlie Morris’ youtube videos and I’ve always liked his modular approach, so I tried to mimic it by putting together a sort of development platform for homebrewing radios.

I built up a permanent board with a power management section, a VFO made with an Arduino Nano, SI5351, LCD, and rotary encoder and mounted it on a piece of plywood. I added some screws and washers to hold down some copper boards that can be swapped out for each project. I still need to mount a permanent antenna connection and a speaker, but going forward, when I want to start a new project, I can just loosen the screws and swap out the main boards with blank ones to start fresh.

I’ve just started working on a simple 80 meter SSB superhet. You can see the audio amplifier already on the board below. I’ll be expanding it and adding subsequent posts building and testing each module.