Local oscillator below the station frequency--why?
On Wed, 18 Feb 2009, COLIN LAMB wrote:
"The image rejection is so poor on the top band of many consumer grade
radios that its really a moot point and the
only way to guess which side the injection goes is by evaluating which side
suffers the worse dial tracking..."
Right. I recently went through just this problem. Radio had been twiddled
with. The service information said nothing about whether low or high side
injection was used. I used the trial and error method to figure it out. I
looked through two different service instructions and both were silent.
I remember one review for a low end receiver, and I can't remember which
receiver or which magazine, and they outright said there was so little
image rejection that they couldn't tell which was real and which was
the image.
On the other hand, I recently reread a review for the Radio Shack sw
receiver from the late sixties, transistorized and something like the
DX-150, and it praised the receiver for it's image rejection even on the
highest band. I suspect it was thus a very generous review.
The good news is that single conversion radios, with 1 rf amplifier stage,
are rarely used above 20 meters anyway, these days.
Of course, that's apples and oranges. The frequency of the IF factors
in, and it's not the single conversion that matters, but the signal
frequency versus the IF frequency.
Michael VE2BVW
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