Ashish N6ASD's Beautiful SolderSmoke Direct Conversion Receiver -- Built in Bangalore -- "This was such a fun project. This was my first direct conversion build, and I learned a lot along the way."

Ashish N6ASD is a really good guy.  We started watching his projects when he was in San Francisco.  He does a lot of fundamental radio building.  And he is a friend of Homebrew Hero Frank Harris K0IYE. 

When I spotted a "thumbs up" from an N6ASD on the SolderSmoke Discord channel, I knew that we would soon have yet another Bangalore Direct Conversion Receiver.  Ashish has been in contact with both Farhan and Ramakrishnan.  FB. 

Ashish writes:  I finally finished building the receiver! This was such a fun project. This was my first direct conversion build, and I learned a lot along the way. The biggest challenge was finding stable capacitors for the oscillator. In my first attempt, I used whatever I had in my junk box, but those capacitors drifted all over the place. Mica caps seemed expensive and difficult to get in Bangalore. I ended up buying surface-mount NP0 capacitors instead. Soldering them was a hassle, but they are much cheaper and easier to get here. Next step will be more mods and experimentation! The first improvement will be in the BPF. I will replace the regular ceramic caps with NP0 caps and re-tune it.

Here is Ashish's receiver inhaling CW:   

Congratulations Ashish -- Welcome to the Hall of Fame! 

Ashish N6ASD

The resemblance between Ashih's photo and the famous

1818 painting by Caspar David Friedrich is completely coincidental,  

but quite remarkable. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog