lol thanks for the calling me crazy comments,
I don't think that any one has called you "crazy".
Your circuit is bizarre and cannot possibly work without the effects of stray inductance and capacitance on the breadboard and stripboard, which is why the frequency changes greatly when the circuit is moved from one to the other.
but the first one i built i was able to transmit clearly and i mean clearly up to 60ft away on 104-108MHZ
Provided that there is RF energy being radiated at the receiver frequency, you will hear it, but that is not a guarantee that it is working correctly.
Yes i know breadboards are horrible for RF circuits, ... ...the main problem it gave was it would transmit on about 5 different radio stations at one time.
Which probably means that as well as the carrier frequency, there was an spurious oscillation at a lower frequency (a few hundred khz) modulating the carrier and producing a comb of frequencies all carrying your ipod signal which you could hear.
Also on the breadboard it easily operated from 80-108MHZ. Then i moved to a protoboard and it shifted up higher. So i'm running into the same problem with this second design. I can believe some of it can be due to leads being to close, but i'd like to see if anyone can suggest a single component that will allow for it to drop.
The first "component" to change would be the circuit board.
Use a piece of blank, un-etched copper clad board and build the circuit using "ugly construction" or "manhatten construction", (Google it). It may be ugly but it will give reliable operation at VHF.
The second "component" is the whole of the rest of the circuit, at the risk of repeating myself, it is a complete non-starter.
This was a final project that was for a second Microelectronics class that has a writing element to it. So most of the projects we did dealt with different set up of transistors and focused mainly on the writing of the report. Also we were able to choose the project and why choose a project that is gonna be ridiculously hard when i could get an A on this one haha.
There should be no way that you should get a mark higher than F for this work base upon that circuit.
I know this isn't like many other FM transmitters, because most use a variable capacitor. There was one group in my class trying to build a transmitter with one of those but they couldn't get it to work plus it costed them $7 for that piece. Where mine is homemade coil with 6 turns of insulated wire with a ferrite core inside.
A good idea, permeability tuned circuits are not new, but in this case it is a good solution.
$7 for a variable capacitor? I am assuming you mean a small trimmer type capacitor, wow that is expensive!
Also another assumption i have is that the frequency is being chosen by the modulation stage, but it's hard to test once it's soldered in.
Not sure what you mean here, but the modulator should not be able to "chose" the carrier frequency.
JimB