Yesterday I was describing the heavenly sounds coming from my crystal radio. In a minimalist mood, this morning I fired up (an appropriate term!) my ET-1 regen rig. This is the single FET transceiver described in earlier blog articles. The contrast with yesterday's experience couldn't be starker. Instead of Gregorian chants, I was greeted by the screeches of excessive regeneration. The crystal receiver seemed to WANT to demodulate signals, the regen required all kinds of adjustment and coaching and, it seemed, black magic. All this made me think that while the crystal sets are heavenly, the regens seem like they are from the other place.
There is a Roman ham who has said he will try to have a contact with me using this ET-1 rig. One will be enough, then it will be back to direct conversion and superhets for me.
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An Unintended Post-Mortem
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Many of us wind up in a similar situation, I'm sure: we impulse buy at
hamfests—great plans for some big old currently non-working piece of
gear—and then...
2 hours ago
'Tis unfair to damn all regens based on one poor design. I've just spent a couple of hours listening to some Field Day action (CW) on my Scout Regen. No screeching, no retuning, very stable. --Jerry AA6KI
ReplyDeleteThere actually scientific facts as to why one regen circuit works well and another does not. I have outlined the reasons in my book Regenerative Radio Receivers. A lot of the circuits published on the internet and even in some respected magazines are not very reliable and depend on the specifics of a particular FET's parameters. For every 10 people who build a regen maybe 1 gets lucky and gets a great result. The other nine are less than happy. You need to put some science into it.
ReplyDelete