The Midnight Design Solutions “Phaser” Transceiver Kit
I have been a fan of Midnight Design Solutions1 since I purchased and constructed its Scaler Network Analyzer (SNA) kit to augment the test equipment I use to build and maintain my station. That kit provided a great tool to analyze my antennas, draw SWR curves, tune bandpass filters and plot their response curves, and add a variable frequency generator, an LC meter, and a crystal tester to my bench. When I bought the SNA kit, I joined Midnight’s Groups.io discussion forum3 and that’s how I recently learned of the company’s latest kit offering and the subject of this article … the “Phaser,” a QRP digital mode transceiver.
Just before Christmas 2019, George Heron, N2APB, at Midnight Design Solutions announced that he had teamed with Dave Benson, K1SWL, of Small Wonder Labs fame, to offer a simple transceiver to operate in FT8 or another digital mode of your choice. Dave is well known in QRP circles and this is his first foray into kit design after retiring and moving to New Hampshire some years back. Dave and George provided a “First Look” at the Phaser in the February 2020 issue of CQ.2 Since I love to build radio kits and enjoy learning about new aspects of ham radio, I thought about purchasing one of these kits.
I still find it “magical” that you can take a bunch of discrete electronic parts, hook them together, and then communicate around the world. While I have been active in digital radio using RTTY, I hadn’t yet played with the recently popular FT8 mode. This kit, I thought, might give me the motivation I needed to try FT8 on the air with a QRP radio. After all, FT8 is supposed to be a weak-signal mode and operating QRP seemed like the perfect mate to that. The discussion forum was abuzz with interest and Rick, K3IND, posted a note asking whether anyone there was interested in building his Phaser kit. I jumped at the chance to do that.
What is the Phaser?
The Phaser is a digital-mode transceiver using a simple direct-conversion receiver coupled with a 4-watt single-sideband (SSB) transmitter. This differs from other simple digital-mode radios using a double sideband (DSB) approach to both the receive and transmit circuits. Dave used this DSB RX/SSB TX combination in his design criteria so that two Phasers could communicate with each other. As Dave explains, the SSB transmitter “… eliminates the issue of out-of-phase signal cancellation at the [other] Phaser’s direct-conversion receiver.” (See the block diagram in Figure 1 for an overview of the Phaser’s design).
As I write this, the Phaser is sold in single-band versions for 80, 40, 30, 20, and 17 meters, although Dave may be designing 10- and 60-meter versions as well. Each version differs only in the band-specific components required for their low-pass and bandpass filters; the core design is identical for all. As a measure of their success, in the two months since announcing availability of the Phaser, more than 300 kits have been sold.
The Phaser generates its SSB transmitted signal using a phasing method to suppress the unwanted sideband, hence the name. This phasing design departs from the>.
