BATC Forum

As mentioned elsewhere in this forum you can convert the old Minitiouner V1 to a Knucker. Here is how I did it.

First see if your old Minitiouner V1 is working with a PC or Portsdown?
Now the final blow to it - cut out the old tuner so you can desolder the remains (no need if you used a socket)
Solder (socket) the new tuner from BATC shop (https://batc.org.uk/shop/serit-ftm-4762-nim/ ) leaving pins 3,5,6 and 7 bent away from the board. (or if you have sockets you have to alter the tracks )
Connect pins 5 and 6 to ground.


Now add 150k resistor in parallel with R5 (I used two to make up the value ).


Now all that is needed is to reprogram the USB device!
It took a while to work that out but it does work.

Here are some receiver photos..



Martin G8LCE

I could get it to work at 146.5MHz and 437MHz.
333kHz and 1000MHz with testcard and PiCam
I also used IPTS in as the encoder at 1000kHz Bandwidth and a 2000k stream input. This worked but with a very long delay (up to several minutes! Where does all that video get stored? )
Must get around to putting it a case this time...

Here is the modified Knucker with the old cut out tuner near a couple of Rydes:
Martin G8LCE

For anyone trying to do this conversion here are some links:

Here you can find details of your old V1

https://wiki.batc.org.uk/MiniTiouner_hardware_Version_1

and here you can find details of the Knucker:

https://wiki.batc.org.uk/Knucker#Portsdown_system

From the two pages you can find the circuit diagrams and differences and also a guide to reprogramming the USB interface although more info is on this link:

viewtopic.php?t=4767

And finally here is the link to the inspiration for my experimentation:

viewtopic.php?f=134&t=7118&start=30#p26080

One other thing I found was that the USB would only program with power supplied to the board.

Martin G8LCE

Nice piece of upcycling

- Charles