First contact with an MSF receiver

Back in May last year I wanted to play with an MSF receiver, so I went and bought one from PV Electronics. This first video is just powering it up for the first time after connecting the wiring loom and antenna. The LED shows the raw MSF datastream that is being received. (The TO-220 package you see at the beginning is a good old faithful 7805 voltage regulator.)

A few weeks later, I was prototyping it out and hooking it up to an Arduino UNO. I had a TLC5916 LED driver chip hooked up and running an 8 bit binary count on the LEDs you can see. If you look at the indicator LED on the receiver board, you can see that something isn't quite right.

Something is generating RF noise in the 60kHz band (which is perfetly acheivable by the components on the board). You can see that, depending on the orientation of the ferrite antenna with respect to the breadboard, the noise comes and goes.

I'm not sure whether this was because of the the long curving wires from the Arduino Uno to the breadboard acting as an antenna; or if it is because of switching noise from the TLC5916 as it drives it's output FETs with the PWM train.

In those infamous scientist words, "More research is required"