January 4, 2005

DIY Electronics - Radio Receiver

M. Simon over at Power and Control is building a classical radio receiver - a regenerative. These are hard to tune (you are close to a threshold where crossing over gives you a loud squeal) but the sensitivity and the precision of tuning is excellent for what amounts to a fairly simple circuit. DIY stands for Do-It-Yourself which is unfortunately not that common these days... There is a good description of the project plus lots and lots of links to other circuits and explanations of theory. If you wanted to build a small short-wave receiver from scratch, this would be a very good place to start. I had a nephew visit last summer and he and I built one of these kits from Ramsey Electronics. It is a superheterodyne receiver - the design that followed the regenerative (more complex, softer tuning but easier to operate) and he is having a blast with it, picking up Chinese and Spanish broadcasts. Posted by DaveH at January 4, 2005 10:42 PM
Comments

I'm honored that you noticed.

For a regen this radio is not too hard to tune because I used a 10 turn pot for the regen control.

What is truly amazing is that if I tune in a station wit a lot of interference I just advance the regen control (up to a point) and the selectivity gets better.

I'm working on a Tayloe detector for my next project. It uses mostly digital circuits and is very selective without doing the super hetrodyne thing.

A lot of stuff is possible for the amateur these days but you need to design circuit boards because of the very small size of modern components. Hand wiring of a whole circuit is becoming a physical impossibility. Fortunately getting boards made is not too expensive these days.

BTW for any one interested I have one or two boards left of the regen radio. Drop mer a line.

Posted by: M. Simon at January 11, 2005 9:09 PM