Regens: A Complex Relationship; AA7EE's WBR

Bill -

I've been following your blog for a while now and am moved to let you know of my recent experience with regens, a subject that I know is dear to your heart or perhaps, more accurately, the basis of a complex relationship!

Anyway, the last time I built and owned a regen was as a teenager in the UK in the late 1970's when I had a one-tube HAC Model DX one tube regen. Recently I've been looking for a fairly simple receiver to build that would

receive CW and SSB on 40M, as well as AM. I'm developing an interest in AM on 40, a rather impractical mode in some ways, but one that I have an attachment to. A regen seemed an obvious choice, so after seeing the

reprint in "More QRP Power" of the QST article describing N1BYT's WBR regen, I decided to have a go at it.

In short, I'm so glad this was the first regen of my adult life. It is sensitive, suffers no hand-capacitance effects, has very little radiation from the antenna port due to the oscillator tank circuit being in a Wheatstone Bridge arrangement,

no microphony and to make things even better, is very stable in frequency. I can set it to a net or long-winded CW QSO and it stays there with no easily discernible drift (after a short warm-up period of course).

I know you're probably aware of this receiver, but have you tried building one? I think you'd be pleasantly surprised.

The blog post about my version of this great little receiver is here:

http://aa7ee.wordpress.com/2011/http://aa7ee.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/the-wbr-a-simple-high-performance-regen-receiver-for-40m-by-n1byt/07/24/the-wbr-a-simple-high-performance-regen-receiver-for-40m-by-n1byt/

Yours,

Dave Richards

AA7EE

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