[aprssig] low power 2 meter exciter needed

[Art]

I need a simple, low cost and relatively inexpensive exciter (single 
frequency) for 2 meters, and was wondering if users here might have 
any ideas. I want it to take an 18 Mhz quartz crystal input and 
output 10 to 30 milliwatts at 144 Mhz.

It's for a stand alone 2 meter transmitter that can be used for 
trackers and weather station APRS.

There are some user programmable oscillators that are suitable for 
clock drivers in microprocessors, they are not suitable, to much 
jitter and are not stable enough to stay on the same frequency.

A PLL chip is ok, except that any chip I found takes a lot of support 
circuitry (outboard divide by N counters and/or vco's), and they all 
need a microprocessors to talk to the chip to determine it's divide by n value.

Maxim has some low power transmitter chips, but they are unsuitable 
because the vco is built in and cannot oscillate at 2 meters (they 
will only oscillate from 300 to 500 Mhz)... Unfortunately, they did 
not bring provisions to the outside world for allowing the user to 
change the vco's frequency of operation.

I'd rather not design multipliers myself, so I'm really hoping for a 
ready made module or a simple to use chip.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Art
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