One bit of my equipment that I’ve never looked into is my scanner, a handheld Uniden unit. I got this when Maplin Electronics had them on special offer a few years ago.
Here’s the scanner itself, roughly the same size as a usual HT.
Here the back cover has been removed, and the main RF board is visible at the top of the stack. Unfortunately the shielding cans are soldered on this unit, so no looking under there š
On the right hand side of the board next to the antenna input is the main RF filter network, and it’s associated switching. The RF front end is under the shield closest to the front edge.
On the other side of the PCB is the Volume & Squelch potentiometers, along with a dedicated 3.3v switching supply. An NJM2360A High Precision DC/DC converter IC controls this one. A 3.3v test point is visible next to the regulator.
Here’s the backside of the RF board, some more interesting parts here. There’s a pair of NJM3404A Single Supply Dual Op-Amp ICs, and a TK10931V Dual AM/FM IF Discriminator IC. This is the one that does all the back-end radio functionality. The audio amplifier for the internal speaker & external headphone jack is also on this PCB, top left. A board-to-board interconnect links this radio board with the main control board underneath.
Here’s the front of the control PCB, nothing much to see here, just the LCD & membrane keypad contacts.
And here’s the reverse side of the control board. All the interesting bits are here. The main microcontroller is on the right, a Renesas M38D59GF, a fairly powerful MCU, with onboard LCD drive, A/D converter, serial interface, 60K of ROM & 2K of RAM. It’s 6.143MHz clock crystal is just below it.
The mating connector for the RF board is in the centre here.
There is also a Microchip 24LC168 16KB IĀ²C EEPROM next to the main microcontroller. This is probably for storing user settings, frequencies, etc.
The rest of this board is dedicated to battery charging and power supply, in the centre is a dual switching controller, I can’t figure out the numbers on the tiny SOT23 components in here, but this is dealing with the DC 6v input & to the left of that is the circuitry for charging the NiMH cells included with the scanner.
The last bit of this PCB is a BU2092FV Serial In / Parallel Out 4 channel driver. Not sure what this one is doing, it might be doing some signal multiplexing for the RF board interface. Unfortunately the tracks from this IC are routed on the inner layers of the board so they can’t be traced out.
