N8RVE’s WBR Regen Receiver

I’ve been chatting with John N8RVE via e-mail for a while now. He built a little receiver that I dubbed “The Rugster” – it’s a direct conversion receiver consisting of a standard NE602 front end, with a “poor man’s varactor” (1N4001) to tune the bottom 50KHz of 40M. The AF stages and narrow filtering are provided by the 4SQRP Hi-Per-Mite filter.  John’s Rugster initially drifted a little, then when he used NPO caps in the frequency sensitive  parts of the circuit, the drift issue cleared right up (funny how that happens!)  He was very happy with his Rugster, as am I with mine.  It’s always great to hear of fellow homebuilders successfully completing projects.

More recently, John built a WBR regen receiver with a FAR Circuits board that he picked up at Dayton, and sent along some pictures of the final receiver. Talk about a neat and original enclosure – he used a piece of plexiglass and a reticle from an oscilloscope –

That’s a neatly wound toroid John –

John says that it sounds great, though he uses an outboard amp, as the audio level was low.  I’m thinking it shouldn’t be too hard to construct a one-transistor pre-amp ugly-style, so that this receiver can pack a little more audio output.

Great job John, and thank you for sharing your success with us!