[HBR] HBR Chassis Kit continued or not : )

[Ron Barlow via HBR]

Hi Martin,
 My hearty congrats on your hb efforts! A very refreshing "read"!
               GL & 73 de ron n4gjv

--------------------------------------------
On Mon, 4/20/15, Martin Marris <mmarris at notecraft.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [HBR] HBR Chassis Kit continued or not : )
 To: "'HBR Receiver List'" <hbr at mailman.qth.net>
 Date: Monday, April 20, 2015, 11:01 AM
 
 Hi Bill,
 
 The answer to your question about my primitive receiver is
 answered at great
 length in this thread on eHam:
 http://www.eham.net/ehamforum/smf/index.php/topic,90273.0.html.
 
 The short answer is that for a receiver that relies on early
 generation
 FETs, and is regenerative to boot, performance is
 surprisingly good.
 Certainly good enough for use in QSOs, or at least I hope so
 (I'm not on the
 air yet). Above all, it is very sensitive. Admittedly, it is
 as wide as a
 barn door but you can't really expect stellar selectivity
 from a regen.
 
 In the past couple of years I have logged several hundred
 "SWL" QSOs from
 all over the world on 10, 15, 20, 40 and 80m on this little
 receiver. I
 can't wait to use it in a two-way QSO!
 
 In a general sense however, I cannot answer your question. I
 am a "new ham"
 (licensed three years ago but with very little spare time)
 and this is my
 *only* receiver: I have not been "spoiled" by a more
 elaborate superhet or
 by commercial gear. My goal is to get on the air with an
 entirely homebrew
 station, vintage 1968. (I have also built the companion
 three-tube
 transmitter and my project is described here:
 http://www.eham.net/ehamforum/smf/index.php/topic,97719.0.html).
 
 The biggest puzzle with the receiver was that, if you built
 it exactly as
 described in the ARRL project, it worked well on 80m and 40m
 but was a bust
 on the other bands (it either failed to oscillate; or when
 it did, it
 "motorboarded" and overloaded badly enough to be unusable).
 
 This was eventually fixed by varying the value of C9, band
 by band. I don't
 really understand why the original design allegedly worked
 fine. My exact
 copy of it did not -- but regen receivers are tricky.
 
 I am so pleased with this little receiver that I have
 (possibly
 over-ambitious) plans to build a second one, with the same
 circuit but using
 slightly larger, 6-prong Amphenol coil forms (instead of the
 1", 5-prong
 Millen ones in the original). This would allow me to wire C9
 inside the coil
 form itself and eliminate some awkward fiddling around every
 time the band
 is changed. As of now, I'm using the receiver pretty much as
 a monoband 40m
 set and plan to hang out on that band exclusively for the
 first few months
 after I get on the air this summer.
 
 For what it's worth, I get the impression that with
 receivers, it's the care
 taken in construction and the quality of the components that
 accounst for at
 least 50 percent of the results. A very simple regenerative
 set probably
 outperforms a multi-tube superhet that's just been thrown
 together.
 
 73 de Martin, KB1WSY