[HBR] What would W6TC do?

[Shoppa, Tim]

My gut feeling, is that the radio he built would look a lot like a K2 :-).

One of the issues is, that a "selling point" for ham radios since soon after the frequency synthesizer, is that it lets you build a general coverage HF receiver, and that's something that many hams are willing to pay for.

The gotcha is, there are a compromises made in a general coverage receiver that very definitely impact performance unless you put extra parts in the radio. But when a ham buys a radio he doesn't see the compromises, he sees specs, and many of those compromises do not show up well in most of the specs.

IMHO the K2 hits a sweet spot, using a simple synthesizer but not compromising performance, by only covering ham bands. (Actually if you're wiling to go in and rewind toroids and change a few capacitors and maybe tweak the firmware you can cover non-ham-bands with the same design.) The result is truly a receiver with few compromises in final performance, built using parts readily available.

I think W6TC would come up with a very similar design, a no compromise ham-band receiver. And he would likely use relay switching like the K2. Although there have been a couple of ham transceivers in the past couple decades, using plug-in modules for each band (e.g. Ten Tec Scout and at least one of the California homebrew designs featured in the ARRL handbook for several recent years... forget the name) but they did not set the bar quite so high in terms of performance.

Tim N3QE
________________________________________
From: hbr-bounces at mailman.qth.net [hbr-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Walt Hutchens [waltah at earthlink.net]
Sent: Saturday, January 08, 2011 8:23 PM
To: HBR Receiver List
Subject: [HBR] What would W6TC do?

The question comes from thinking about some of the questions and ideas
posted here in the last few months. Specifically, what would Ted Cosby
do differently if he were designing an HBR today?

In order to keep the question 'pure,' I rule out whatever thoughts he
might have on integrated circuits, software defined receivers, and the
like: Perhaps like me he got frozen on vacuum tubes a few decades back
and wanted today to do a tube receiver along the old lines but using
the parts available for vacuum tube construction today.

I'm assuming the goals of 'you can build it' and 'it will outperform
most commercial sets of equivalent technology' would stay the same. I
think that would mean keeping the plug in coils.

Beyond that, however, things are less certain.

Thoughts, anyone?

Walt Hutchens
KJ4KV

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