40 Meter Superhet

I was surprised to hear my grandson, Jamie repeating the "boot up" CW sent by the homebrew ELSIE LC meter one night in my workshop. I set up the 30m SKN Special I built a couple of years ago in his room, and Jamie started copying CW over the air and sending the characters back on a homebrew code practice oscillator I built for him. He is also is now copying from the K7QO MP3 CW practice files on an old laptop in his bedroom. So, I decided to put off the plans for a 40m transceiver and build just the receiver for Jamie. The receiver is based on the K1SWL SW-40+ in ELMER 101, using homebrew CAD-produced PC boards for the VFO and the receiver.

I initially started building two receivers, the one shown here as well as an ugly-style construction "Popcorn" receiver" from the qrppops.net web site. I decided to go with this rig, rather than the homebrew Popcorn receiver, because I finally got this VFO to work right (had the tuning diode in backwards), and my Popcorn's VFO has issues. In my implementation of the the K1SWL-design VFO I used polystyrene caps, and it is very stable. The second output of the Colpitts VFO, which would normally go to the transmit mixer, provides the input signal for the PIC-based DL4YHF-designed homebrew frequency counter. The 4-pole Cohn-type crystal filter is modified to provide about 1 kHz bandwidth so Jamie can hear more of the sounds of the band. I also modified the AF bandwidth of the audio amp for a wider bandwidth.

The surplus 4.0 MHz crystals are TV set pulls given to me by Harold, KE6TI, and when I characterized them on my PVXO test unit, they had very high Q and less than 10 kHz spacing among the four I chose. As a standard practice, I have started building all my crystal filters as plug-ins so that I can experiment with them. The BFO signal at 4 MHz is positioned on the skirt of the crystal filter for very good single-signal performance. The VFO and counter use feedthrough caps for power, and brass tubing is used for coaxial cable feed through. The rig covers the lower 100 kHz of the 40m band. With the digital readout, a 10-turn pot is used for tuning.

Below is the internal view of the receiver. Click to enlarge.

40 Meter Supehet Internals