I built a few tube type home brew receivers a few years ago. I would say they are good performing receivers on AM, and would work very well on cw/ssb with a good product detector added.
My receivers wound up working better than anything else I owned, or ever owned, so I sold off most of the vintage stuff. My receivers have digital readout, its very accurate, are stable, and extremely quiet. They have an S meter and bfo (for zero beating), are single conversion to 455Khz, and have low distortion detectors. Building them was the most fun I ever had at building radio equipment. I think its quite easy to build a good AM receiver, if you can find the basic parts (IF cans and power supply parts). Now, if you want general coverage, or to pick up weak signals with a crappy antenna, it gets more complex (and noisy). The IF filters are important, and I found filters made by Kiwa to work very well at a low price. Sometimes simple is better though, the homebrew receivers seem much better to me than the R390a I had, the icom 756 pro, the SX17 I had, or any of the regular ham type receivers I ever had, and I had quite a few in the past. By better I mean they pick up weak signals better, signals that are lost in the noise floor in the R390a or 756pro are easy to copy on the home brew. Fidelity is much better than the 756pro, slightly better than the R390A. If you build it, you can add the features you like, and design it to do what you want, for example, when I change bands between 160, 80 and 40 meters, it jumps between 1880,3880 and 7290 Khz. Tuning rate and range can be set to what you want. Digital display, analog display, modern look, vintage look, small or large size, whatever you want, just the way you want it! Brett N2DTS -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Byron Tatum Sent: Friday, May 27, 2005 10:15 PM To: AMRadio@mailman.qth.net Subject: [AMRadio] AM Shortwave Hello- Does anyone know of books, magazine articles or websites that have construction articles for homebrew shortwave tube and transistor radio sets? I would like to build a medium to high performance shortwave receiver. Are there any kits besides Ten-Tec? Thanks, Byron. ______________________________________________________________ AMRadio mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/amradio Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.html Post: mailto:AMRadio@mailman.qth.net
