[Premium-Rx] Article by Nils Schiffhauer DK8OK: "Dinosaur Concepts"

[Tim Shoppa]

"Adam Farson" <farson at shaw.ca> wrote:
> I have just completed an English translation of Nils Schiffhauer's
> excellent, thought-provoking article "Saurier-Konzepte" (Dinosaur Concepts).
> The translation is on my website:
>
> http://www.ab4oj.com/dl/misc/dinosaur_concepts.pdf

Well, I just read it, and I think it misses the points of high-performance
receiver design entirely even though the manufacturers seem to rediscovering
them yet again. (The past couple of years they're called preselectors
and "roofing filters", strangely enough 50 years ago we called them
the antenna trimmer and the IF filter!).

It does do a passable job of summarizing the points of at least some,
maybe many, middle-of-the-road receiver users. But even there it
only pays attention to a couple of design schools (nay, really "brand
names and models") and ignores the really clever yet back-to-basic, spectacular
performance single-conversion receivers that have come out of nowhere
in the past few years (e.g. K2).

I don't think the high-performance
direct conversion approaches even registered, which is a shame too, because
I think that soon these are going to completely blaze ahead over every other
receiver technology. It's astonishing to have a machine which can
record a swath of the spectrum tens of MHz wide and let you pick over
it however you want with whatever intelligence you can put into your
computer. Some of these, rescaled, are popping up in ham circles and sending
communities into whiplash with their anarchist techniques (e.g. "CW
Skimmer").

Tim.