I still enjoy a regenerative receiver. Even with a trf stage to avoid radiating QRM, it's an amazingly small handful of parts, but one that provides astounding performance with practice and a tender touch. What a delight to pull in signals clean and crisp!
QRM can be unpleasant, but it isn't always so. Like listening to people chatter in a crowded room, a little practice pulls out what we want to hear. That's been so since the very early days when even the selectivity of a simple regenerative detector was something unimaginable. Author Thomas Randall described it like this in his novel "The Nymph and the Lamp": "When you put on the phones it was as if your inner self stepped out of the bored and weary flesh... you were part of another world, the real, the actual living world of men and ships and ports... Whistling, growling, squealing, moaning, here were the voices of men transmuted through their finger tips, issuing in dots and dashes... flinging what they had to say across the enormous spaces... At night when the darkness increased their range by three, four or five times the uproar was terrific, the sound of a vast swamp on a spring night filled with vociferous frogs..." Hopefully our rigs today don't "whistle, growl, squeal" etc., like the spark transmitters of old, but there's something lost in the sterile, impeccable signals we expect today, all too often with machine-perfect keying that robs our signals of their last vestige of personal identity. Ron AC7AC ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
