Serit tuner

As of February 2017 the Sharp and Samsung tuners are no longer available and the Minituner project will use a tuner from Serit which cover from 140MHz right through to 2650 MHz without the need for any upconverters.

Dual receiver

The Serit tuner is capable of receiving more than one signal simultaneously; however the BATC hardware and software can only receive one signal at a time. There is provision for a socket on the converter PCB to connect to the second receive output of the FTS4335V for experimentation. F6DZP's dual receive software is still under development and may be available for testing. See his web site at: http://www.vivadatv.org

Even though only one transmission can be received at any time with this converter PCB, it is possible to select which of the two antenna sockets is used, allowing one of two antennas / converters to be connected.

Filters and pre-amps

The wide band coverage makes building a receiver for 146 or 437 much easier, although you will need a pre-amp followed by lots of filtering for each band, just like the Sharp did, and probably followed by a Satellite line amp from ebay as the Serit has less gain than the Sharp.

Filter designs are available here

Software

To use the Serit tuner you will need to run Ver 0.6d or later versions of the excellent Minitioune software. This is available for download from here and will work with Sharp, Eardatek or Serit tuners.

Adapter card

Also, due to a different pinouts from the Sharp NIM, the Serit tuner will also need a simple adapter board to enable it to be plugged in to the Minituner standard hardware.

Brian G4EWJ has designed a PCB and the blank board plus a full set of (leaded) components and the Serit tuner is available in the BATC shop.

Full instructions on how to build the kit are available in this pdf:

File:Serit FTS4335V Converter Kit MTK2 Instructions v1-04.pdf