This is my first Pic a Star and was started about 2 years ago with the purchase for Ł10 of an ancient FM tuner in a nice solid case. The case has a big cut-out on the bottom where the tuner PCB was mounted. This tuner had discrete transistors and the board looked hand soldered ...age unknown. The front panel is a false panel and had a long clear scale and two tuning/signal level meters. I thought this would be ideal and started with a second version of the Pic-and Mix DDS VFO. This one uses an ad9581 clocked at 175 M Hz and the pcb's were produced by copying the original circuit onto my computer, enhancing the track and deleting the components and background. I then drew in some groundplane and etched the boards as described on my PCB page (PCB) The boards look a little different from the initial ones but worked perfectly. I used a number of surface mount capacitors to decouple the various lines and particularly between the 5v and ground plane of the DDS. I also used both outputs of the DDS and combined them with a little balun transformer as suggested by Analog Devices in the data sheet. The output transistor is a 2N5109 (because I had one) but this gives more gain and tusing both outputs adds 3db so the VFO output is around 50mw though it varies a little from band to band. Note that the ad9581 has an internal prescaler and this degrades the phase noise, so I used a 125 Mhz 5th overtone xtal (ordered from quartz slab) as a 7th overtone 175 Mhz.