Polyakov Direct Conversion Receiver on 80 Meters (video)

In today's episode I put the switch in the open position turning the receiver into an ordinary Direct Conversion receiver with a single diode as the detector. I find that it works pretty well on 80, but probably not as well as it does on 40 (where it is in full Polyakov mode). (Yesterday I demonstrated the receiver in action on 40 and provided details on the circuit. See: https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2022/08/polyakov-ra3aae-direct-conversion.html)

You will notice that when I throw the switch, but before I retune the input LC network, you can still hear the signal from the previous band. So when I have it in 40 and I throw the switch to open, you can still hear the 40 meter signal. Apparently one diode will (poorly) demodulate a signal with the VFO running at HALF the operating frequency. I saw this in the real world receiver and also saw it in an LTSpice simulation. In LTSpice the signal level drops significantly when I go to just one diode: From 50 mv peak to 15 mv peak, but it can still be heard. Something similar happens when I go from 80 to 40. When I close the switch and suddenly have two diodes and a 3.5 MHz VFO trying to demodulate the 80 meter signal, I can still hear the 80 meter signal, but it is much weaker and a lot more noise is getting through. Again, I saw this in the real world and in LTSpice. It looks as if with the two diodes, the 3.5 MHz signal is being sampled twice each VFO cycle. This may result in some output in the audio range. But again, it is much weaker.