{"id":13102,"date":"2018-09-28T21:55:07","date_gmt":"2018-09-29T04:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/?p=13102"},"modified":"2018-09-28T21:55:07","modified_gmt":"2018-09-29T04:55:07","slug":"2018-09-28-lm386-used-as-modulator-of-final-rf-output","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/?p=13102","title":{"rendered":"2018-09-28 LM386 Used As Modulator of Final RF Output"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From FB group Building Transistor Radios 2018-09-28<\/p>\n<p>I see nothing wrong with using the &#8216;386 to directly drive the power output stage. It&#8217;s cheaper than a transformer.<\/p>\n<p>But I was thinking about how the current was flowing in the &#8216;386&#8217;s output transistors. Normally an electrolytic capacitor blocks any DC from flowing out of pin 5. But when the &#8216;386 is used to directly modulate the final, the current that would normally flow through the chip&#8217;s bottom (current sink or pulldown) transistor instead flows out pin 5 and through the final. The bottom transistor is not doing anything, it can&#8217;t current sink or pulldown because the pin 5 has current flowing out only, nothing flows in to be sunk or pulled down. So the &#8216;386 is effectively running as a current source with just the top (current source or pull-up) transistor.<\/p>\n<p>The point is that the &#8216;386 chip could be replaced with a single transistor, or two if more gain is needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From FB group Building Transistor Radios 2018-09-28 I see nothing wrong with using the &#8216;386 to directly drive the power output stage. It&#8217;s cheaper than a transformer. But I was thinking about how the current was flowing in the &#8216;386&#8217;s output transistors. Normally an electrolytic capacitor blocks any DC from flowing out of pin 5.<a href=\"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/?p=13102\"> <\/p>\n<p> (Read More&#8230;)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,261],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-radio-frequency","category-transmitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13103,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13102\/revisions\/13103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}