The WBR seems to get a bit of a bad rap with some people for it’s sensitivity. A comment on the last post from a reader called Simon, reminded me that some WBR builders have experienced poor sensitivity. Based on my experience, this design does seem to be fairly deaf on AM, but the sensitivity […]
Occasionally, I drag out old projects from their resting and display positions on my shelf, plug ’em in, and give ’em a whirl. It’s fun to watch as past home-brew rigs come back to life, and relive the feelings of wonder, as a handful of parts that I soldered together actually receive signals and in […]
A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from Mike N2HTT. He was building a WBR Regen, and had encountered a problem – the pesky thing didn’t work. That is indeed, quite a problem. Luckily for me, he quickly discovered that the reason was an incorrectly wired JFET, before I had a chance to confuse […]
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 […]
Note – some of the narrative in this blog-post assumes that you have access to, and have read, N1BYT’s original article on the WBR Receiver in the August 2001 edition of QST. EDIT – as of July 2016, I just modded this receiver to cover the 30M ham band only, and have been surprised by […]
About a week and a half ago, I received an e-mail from Rich W9RNK. After a long period of home-brew inactivity (about 20 years) he decided to pick up the soldering iron and start building again. He said that my post on building N1BYT’s WBR Regen Receiver (the most popular post on this blog by far) […]
Phew – quite a headline there. I suppose if I were a more organized blogger, I’d break this into several different topics and get several blog-posts out of it. However, I’d like to get it all out of the way, and get this info imparted to you in one fell swoop, so here goes. After […]
I finally got around to putting up a video of the WBR Regen on YouTube. Unfortunately, I didn’t get many good recordings of SSB – this was mainly due to band conditions and the times of day that I was recording. However, it was time for me to get this thing out so that I […]
EDIT (July 26th 2014) – If you’re thinking of building the WBR, I strongly suggest you check out my most recent build here, which incorporates a mod suggested by LA3PNA, and a different configuration for the AF amp that I think provides nicer sounding audio. The full schematic is published there also. A few weeks ago when […]
Dave Richards AA7EE 