SUMMER CIRCUITSCOLLECTION

ther experimenting. T1
S1 BC238C +4V A1
The SMD coils of the Stettner 5503 series are
suitable for such oscillators. In Germany, they R2 R5 R6
R1 C5
are available from Bürklin (www.buerklin.de),

4k7

1k

470Ω
1k5
1n
with values between 12 nH and 1200 nH. You C6
can thus directly put together any desired BT1
C2
6 5 4 100p
value using two suitable coils. If you want to
1µ 10V OUT+ OUT–
wind your own coils, try using 8 to 14 turns of 9V
IC1
0.5-mm diameter silver-plated copper wire on U NF C3 R4 MAX2606

a 5-mm mandrel. You can make fine adjust-

470Ω
3
TUNE * voir texte
ments to the inductance of the coil by slightly
10µ
10V fc 2
IND
1
* zie tekst
spreading or compressing the coil.
D1
C1
R3
C4 L1 * see text

10k
The circuit draws power from a 9-V battery. 10µ
P1
100k 1n
* * siehe Text
4V7 400mW 10V
The BC238C stabilises the voltage to approx-
014082 - 11
imately 4 V. Although the MAX2606 can work
with a supply voltage between +2.7 V and f (MHz) 89–95 93–99 97–103 100–106 103–109
+5.5 V, a stabilised voltage improves the fre- L (nH) 500 470 420 390 350
quency stability of the free-running oscillator.
The supply voltage connection Vcc (pin 5)
and the TUNE voltage (pin 3) must be decoupled by 1-nF nected to each of the outputs for this purpose. You can use
capacitors located as close as possible to the IC pins. The a capacitor to tap off the radio signal from either one of
tuning voltage TUNE on pin 3 may lie between +0.4 V and these resistors. Several milliwatts of power are available.
+2.4 V. A symmetric output is provided by the OUT+ and At the audio input, a signal amplitude of 10 to 20 mV is
OUT– pins. In the simplest case, the output can be used in enough to generate the standard VHF frequency deviation
a single-ended configuration. Pull-up resistors are con- of ±40 kHz. (014082-1)

AC Controller using MOSFETs 028

Particularly with low voltages, triacs are usually used as
control elements for ac voltages. The disadvantage, as so D1 La1

often is the case, is in the power dissipated in the control T1, T2 = MTD20N03
1N4001
element, which is quite evident for currents greater than T1 D

1 ampère. In such cases, it is essential to use a heatsink for G

the triac. If you want to control the brightness of a halogen µC
R1 S
lamp using such an arrangement, for example, the voltage 100Ω

drop across the triac also results in a significant reduction D3

T2 S

C1
in the maximum brightness of the lamp. G

This disadvantage can be avoided by using two MOSFETs 5V1

100µ
10V
D
D2
for the control element, in place of a triac. The trick here is 500mW

to connect the two MOSFETs in series with opposite polar- 1N4001

ity, with the gates connected in parallel to the control cir-

cuit. The junction of the two gate leads represents the virtual
ground of the circuit, which forms the reference for all other
potentials. Modern MOSFETs, such as the 20N03 from On
Semiconductor (www.on-semi.com) with an RDS(ON) of
0.035 Ω, can be used in this circuit for controlling a 50-W
halogen lamp without any supplementary heatsink. The
loss in brightness is negligible, since the voltage drop is
only (0.035 Ω × 4.2 A) = 0.147 V. Of course, you do not nec-
essarily have to use the 20N03; in principle, any n-channel
014086 - 11
MOSFET with a low gate voltage (preferably a ‘logic FET’)
can be used.
Another benefit of this circuit is its ‘zero-power’ gate drive,
in contrast to triacs, which require drive currents of 10 mA
or more. This means that any microcontroller, TTL gate or
555 timer IC can be used as the controller.
(014086-1)

42 Elektor Electronics 7-8/2001