We are really pleased to have Tasmania in the group. As I typed Tasmanian D…. I almost typed Tasmanian Devil! But no, Ian’s receiver is really nice.
The only reason I put it in the “Honorable Mention” category is the use of the large pre-made board. There is nothing wrong with using one of those, but in this project we called for the use of four separate boards and the Manhattan technique. And,earlier, when others started using something like this, we urged them to “go Manhattan” and they did. I hope Ian will understand.
The receiver sounds great Ian. Congratulations. 73 Bill Hi7/N2CQR
Early on, Andy sent in a report on a Direct Conversion receiver that he had built. It looked kind of like ours, but it was clearly NOT ours. It even had a 20 db RF amplifier ahead of the mixer. We politely (I hope) pointed out the differences. Andy quickly came back with the receiver picutred above. Yes, that is ours! Thanks Andy!
Andy writes:
I’m calling it done (for now)! 1) Biggest challenge for me was “coloring inside the lines”. In other words, building the actual DCR challenge to the schematic vs. getting too creative with other circuits in my head. 2)My biggest breakthrough was developing a much better understanding of the diode ring mixer. And how brass displacing air in the PTO works. 3) What’s next? I want to try some transformer-less audio amps to see if I can find a design for the folks that are having trouble finding a cheap source for the 1000/8 transformer. A super big thanks to both Bill @N2CQR and Dean @Soldersmoke for all the hard work bringing the DCR challenge and the Discord community to life. Bravo! And I would also like to thank Pete (N6QW) our guiding light and spiritual leader too. If it wasn’t for the SolderSmoke Podcast and the Blog, I would still be living life as an appliance operator. 73 KB7ZUT ..
Andy posted these to the Discord server:
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Bill AB5XQ told me that his was an “Ugly Duckling” receiver. I would disagree with him. Any device — like Bill’s — capable of pulling conversations out of the ether is, in my book, beautiful. Condgratulations Bill.
Bill wrote:
Well that was the first time I ever tried to record my work, so I know it is poor quality. My antenna is an attic dipole which is not optimum either. Yes I have tweeted the bandpass filter, but I am guilty of trying to touch it up by ear and I know I have gotten it off, so I will give that a go also. I am very happy with the receiver, I know it is an ugly duckling as compared to some of the others, but I learned a lot and know that I still have some learning to do. Thanks again to you and Dean for challenging us to get busy in homebrew.
73, Bill, AB5XQ
Thanks Bill!
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First, very cool sticker Roy. Thanks for designing this. We look forward to defacing cities, bars, and coffee shops across the globe with these stickers.
At the very end Roy ran into an unusual problem: His receiver did a good job with CW, but not so good with SSB. Hmmm. I remembered that we had a similar problem with Chris G7LQX. That problem turned out to be in the diplexer. With Roy’s I took a close look at a picture he sent. He had C-16 as an electrolytic. Uh oh. What value did he have there? Roy told me that he had overlooked the decimal point and had put a 47 uF cap there instead of a .47 cap. Snip snip, a few minutes later all was well with Roy’s receiver.
Great job Roy. Don’t worry about the cap, that is exactly the kind of mistake that all homebrewers make.
Roy wrote:
It’s finally done! Many thanks to Dean and especially Bill for all the help getting my receiver completed. I had a lot of challenges so it was hard to pinpoint anything in particular. Overall it was a tremendous learning experience in basic radio electronics and in the uses and limitations of my test gear.
Next up I need to finish the Norcal 40A I got about halfway done with before putting aside a year ago when I moved house. I also need to complete my PSSST-20 (Pete’s Simple Seven SSB Transceiver) which I had barely started – I feel much better equipped to get that done now.
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Thanks Bill! And @Soldersmoke and lots of others on the Discord here as well. I did tune some SSB, need to add a larger plastic knob/cover to the tuning screw to make it a bit more easily tweakable. Learning process to hit it right on the double-sideband but when you get it dialed it sounds pretty good. Will try this evening and other times of day as well…
Congratulations Adam!
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This one is kind of “out there,” on the fringes of radio respectability. But on the other hand Nate KA1MUQ has just took to a new limit the old ham radio tradition of raiding the kitchen for items that will serve the bases of support for new rigs. Usually, these items are wooden breadboards (hence the term). Nate has taken this quite a bit further, appropriating an entire frying pan because of its copper bottom. Nate reports that there is good news and bad news: The good news is that the receiver is working. The bad news is that his wife has banned him from the kitchen. It takes a brave and dedicated homebrewer to do something like this. Kudos Nate. But you probably should stay out of the kitchen.
Nate’s receiver sounds great, and had provoked some much-needed humor on Discord: There were comments about too much bacon frying noise. And about the frequency readout being eggzactly right. Dead pan humor, and the possibility of a pan-adapter. FB!
Thanks a lot Nate and congratulations.
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Nice job Piotr! Congratulations! In his comments he captures well the excitement that comes from listening to receiver as it first comes to life:
Piotr writes:
It’s alive! Thank you Solder Smoke team. My winding on PTO bit loose, I think I’ll just hot glue gun it. Tuning is delicate, but front panel added some friction. Need to swap audio pot (used linear I had handy), and speaker is 12R (from junk box). Audio stage has a lot of gain – that stage alone did pick up loud AM station with my finger as antenna :). Thanks again de Piotr KD9NHZ
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FB Steve! Your receiver looks and sounds great! Congratulations!
Steve writes:
Thanks to Bill and Dean for all their work and promotion of this project. I learned alot and had fun. The receiver works well now after much tweaking. I need to finalize how the boards will be mounted. I am thinking of mounting the BPF and audio amp boards vertically on the edge of my small piece of wood and create a front panel using a PCB to mount a on-off switch, volume control. on/off LED, and the speaker/headphone jack. I also want to add a rear PCB to hold an antenna jack and power jack.
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When I first saw Martin’s boards, I thought I was looking at something that was not really Manhattan style. But I was wrong — Martin had simply drawn grid squares on his boards. He used MeSquares for his non-ground connections. The SSB his receiver was picking up sounded great.
Martin is a relatively new ham — he started in 2020. It is really nice to have Scotland represented in the group.
Martin writes: One of the main things I learned was how to really start to use my oscilloscope. The band pass filter proved to be challenging as I initially placed my trimmers incorrectly and it took quite a while to find the problem. I’m looking at this as a potential high school project, so all my soldering was with lead free solder, as I run a community interest company providing tech workshops for disadvantaged kids. I would like next to look at building a complimentary transmitter. Will also have a look at the mods and upgrades.
Martin has noted the touchiness of the main tuning knob. One of the mods he should look at is the one that allows for easier tuning across the 40 meter band. It is described in detail in a post on mods-and-modifications.
Thanks Martin, and congratulations.
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Mark KI5SRY came up with a very innovative solution for the tuning dial problem. See above. My solution was much less sophisticated: At the suggestion of VK3YE, I just put a calibrated card underneath the screw. By looking at the screw edge from above, I could get a rough estimate of where I was in the band:
Looking back on his successful build of the receiver, Mark wrote:
You made this pretty straightforward. My biggest challenge was trying to understand what was really happening in the circuit.
I learned how to use my oscilloscope, seeing the oscillator come to life was great.
I would like to build a transmitter or a complete transceiver.
Bill, thanks to all of the effort you and Dean are putting into this project. There was definitely a magical feeling dialing in and getting legible sound out something built on my bench.
Very cool Mark. Congratulations!
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Wow, Jeff N0NQD built a beautiful receiver, and has been bitten bad by the homebrew bug. Jeff admitted that he recently went to a gala with his wife. He was preoccupied with the problems he was having with his DC receiver. Suddenly DURING THE GALA he remembered having mis-identified two capacitors in the mixer. So he and his wife HAD TO GO HOME FROM THE GALA so that he could fix the problem. And apparently he is still alive, and married! Amazing!
Jeff wrote:
I have been a ham for just about 40 year and typically build kits lots of them most recent the QMX. I found a new passion and seemingly addiction now because of this build. My next Home-brew project is probably going to be a transceiver or a complex receiver not sure what type just yet. It has been so much fun and highly distractive to be apart of this Soldersmoke DCR family. And hope this continues!! Thank you and 73 Jeff N0NQD
Jeff N0NQD’s Bench
Thanks Jeff. Congratulations!
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Erik built a really nice receiver. I was glad that he took to heart our advice on the need for a large, insulating tuning dial. He made one! As he made this entire receiver.
Eric wrote:
I would like to make a homebrew QSO! I am learning CW, mainly because I find it easy to use QRP/POTA. I have a Michigan Mighty Mite, but it has not reached farther than my backyard yet, so a CW transmitter in the single Watt range would be a great next project.
Congratulations Erik!
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All the way through, Ryan displayed a desire to really understand each of the four circuits included in this receiver. He wanted, as Maxwell said, to know not only the “go of it” but “the particular go if it.” FB!
Ryan wrote:
Here’s a short video of my receiver in action. I’m very pleased to be receiving real radio! I’m too inexperienced, so don’t really know if this is good or bad performance for this receiver. This is about as good as I’ve gotten so far. A few people I can understand well, but many are not really intelligible. Thanks to everyone, this is a fun project!
I think it sounds great. Tuning in an SSB station with a DC receiver is an aquired skill — we all get better at it over time.
Congratulations on building a really nice receiver Ryan.
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Above you can watch and listen to Wayde’s receiver as he tunes across 40 meters. It sounds good, even though Wayde is thinking about some improvements.
It was highly appropriate that Wayde’s first reception report should be of CHU Canada, the Canadian time signal on 7.850 MHz, a bit above the 40 meter band, but clearly in tuning range for an unmodified SolderSmoke direct conversion receiver. CHU is probably unique in the world in that it is transmitting the carrier and JUST ONE SIDEBAND. It transmits only the upper sideband. This makes it clearly detectable by our receiver. As Dean pointed out to Wayde, all he had to do was “zero beat” the carrier with the PTO signal (tune to the point where they are on the same frequency and the audio tone disappears). Because there is only one sideband, the direct conversion receiver can demodulate it very well. If there had been two sidebands, this would have been a standard AM signal, and our little receiver — which does very well with SSB and CW — would have been unable to demodulate the signal without distortion. (For an explanation of why this is, see: https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2022/12/but-why-why-cant-i-listen-to-dsb-or-am.html Warning — this is kind of in the “advanced course” category.)
Here is an overhead shot of Wayde’s receiver:
This is a really nice build. The use of what appears to be a kitchen cutting board harkens back to the early days of radio when young hams took the cutting boards from their mothers’ kitchens and used them as bases for rigs. This is origin of the term “bread board.” Frank Jones continued in this tradition by building most of his rigs on wooden boards. Wade’s DC receiver continues in that tradition.
Wade was able to decode some FT8 picked up by this receiver and recorded on his phone:
Congratulations Wade!
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Ken W4KAC tells me that the tuning knob that he used to minimize hand-capacitance effects on his PTO started out as a gear in a leaf blower. I commented that the engineers who designed that gear surely never thought that it would someday be used in a homebrew direct conversion receiver.
Ken lamented the polemical nature of the SSB discussion captured in the above video, but the clip does give a good demo of the SSB capabilities of Ken’s receiver. And the video gives some nice close-ups of the receiver itself.
Ken is a CW guy, and he has already homebrewed a QRP CW transmitter that he hope to pair-up with the receiver. Here it is:
Good morning. Just wanted to say, don’t give up if your receiver is not quite right. Mine was working, I even posted a video here. When building the AF amp from the transformer end back, the Q4 stage was fine. I added Q3 and had a “motor-boating” oscillation when I applied a signal. I tore it all off the board and started over. I still had the problem, so being stubborn I continued on and kept adding more filter caps to quiet it down all I could. The receiver worked and sounded pretty good during the day when I copied WA4FAT and others. That evening was a different story when the band was working well and very full of signals. Very strong stations were ok, but I was getting lots of “hash” and noise other than normal band noise. FT8 was breaking through weakly all over the band along with other unidentified stuff. Yesterday morning I grabbed a new piece of copper clad and built and entirely new AF amp. It tested properly all through the build. Instead of installing that board I decided to find the problem with the original. I “thought” I had used new transistors when I rebuilt it the first time. Turns out I had probably put the original Q3 back, because replacing it cured the problem. I had an entirely different receiver last night. A pleasure to listen to. Don’t give up like I did at first!!
Ken went the extra mile by building a SECOND Direct Conversion receiver. So he may soon get TWO Hall of Fame credits. Here is the second one that Ken built:
Jason did a great job on this receiver, hanging in there as he worked to overcome techincal difficulties, some of which were related to test gear. That is a big part of the homebrew process. The receiver looks and sounds great Jason. Congratulations.
Jason wrote:
I really like the camaraderie and elmering during the process. Not to mention seeing the different builds and how people approached the design. That helped me, as I’m a visual learner. I’ve been a ham for almost 40 years and I love building rigs. This was a blast.Thanks again, Jason WV3V
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Herodotus once said that “learning is not child’s play — we cannot learn without pain.” I think Jim KF8BOG proved that in this build. I’m sure he burned his fingers at least a few times. I remember fondly almost seeing the light buld turn on when Jim came to understand how the diode ring mixer really works. He struggled to tame a rebellious AF amplifier (we’ve all been there). Throughout Jim demonstrated the persistance and determination that are needed to turn a bunch of parts into a well-functioning receiver. He did it. He built it. Congratulations OM!
Jim wrote:
I am not just an appliance operator now but only half way through. Time to make a transmitter!
A little about me I became interested in Ham radio about 45 years ago in Boy Scouts I tried really hard with my Radio shack straight key and morse code chart to learn code by myself and just could never get it. Fast forward to last year and I had a friend who did CERT and he told be about it and said he used 2 meter for communications I was impressed and said “how did you learn morse code?” he replied “ I didn’t you don’t need it anymore” I promptly signed up for Ham in a day in June and got my technician license and my then my general in August. I have been studying radio ever since. This project was perfect for me. I like to make things I have been a mechanic for 40 years plus ASE master. Fixed all sorts of crazy electrical issues but DC and RF are way different lol.
Again Thanks Bill and Dean you don’t know what you have started. 73s KF8BOG
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In many ways it was for guys like John W8UC that we launched this project. These are guys who have been hams for a long time, but — like most hams — never built anything. Most guys don’t see this as a problem. But some guys just don’t like to think of themselves as “appliance operators.” For years the ARRL and others told hams that receivers were just too difficult for them to build. We found this not to be true. So we launched this project, first at a local high school, then to a larger group.
In his comments John says he has been an appliance operator for 48 years. Well, you are an appliance operator no more John — you have built a receiver.
John wrote:
I can hear the signals on a receiver I built so I am super happy about that… I have learned more in the last month about how a receiver works than I have in the last 48 years of being an appliance operator. Thank you Dean and Bill. 3. Would like to build a transmitter next. Also a receiver for another band.
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Dean and I often say that we too have learned a lot from this project, and that the receiver has gotten better as a result of all these builds. But in KE2AMP’s case we really see an innovation that nobody has used before. But it is a great idea and it solves the “loose screw” problem of the PTO. Check out the spring on John’s PTO. That is really smart. Thanks John.
John also sent me a crystal wrapper that will long be cherished by the CBLA (Color Burst Liberation Army):
John wrote:
Well I completed my DCR, and am receiving signals on 40 meter at 1900UTC. My audio amp will oscillate if I turn up over half way and my pto is little loose and makes it bit hard to tune. I put a light spring behind the pto bolt to give it some friction and tighten up. I’m thrilled that I’m receiving signals. I still want to add a front panel to mount the volume pot, the on/off switch and speaker if I have the room.
I am so Thankful to Bill, Dean and everyone on the discord for this project I learned so much more being able to ask questions and follow along with other builders as we worked through each stage of the build. I definitely learned some things about oscilliscopes. And testing each of the stages as we went along.
I would like to try my hand at a SSB transmitter to go along with this receiver. I have built a working MMM but was just to see if I could. I don’t know CW
Oh and I included pic’s of something Bill will like.
Pick it up at a ham fest last summer.
Will that get me into the color burst liberation army?
Thanks Again, 73
de John KE2AMP
Consider yourself inducted John. The CBLA needs innovative people like you!
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It was really great to hear those Australian voices coming from Phil’s receiver. Check out the video above.
Phil writes:
Completion! So pleased, it works really well. And there were lots of lessons for me along the the way. Thank you Dean, Bill and Pete, it’s been a great way to get me into homebrewing. 73s from sunny Queensland. Phil VK4PG
I also like Phil’s front panel. Note how he put to use the circular piece that remained after cutting the speaker hole; that became the tuning knob. FB Phil. Thanks.
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