On Fri, 6 Mar 2015, gareth wrote:

"John Davis" wrote in message
...
On 2/25/2015 5:37 PM, gareth wrote:

Here is your big chance to prove your superiority of knowledge about
the super-regrenerative method, but you've gone strangely silent, which
is a bit bizarre when you consider how many times you have oft
repeated your childish sneer?

Perhaps you will listen to the voice of expierence.

My first receiver was a Knight Kit Star Roamer.. now this is a superhet,
true, but as it turns out it had a REGEN control in one stage, that stage
could be made super regenerative,, You used this to receive CW or SSB,, i
used that radio for many years.

I fear that you will be incorrect and confusing regeneration and
super-regeneration.

I almost missed it. No, he's talking about a superhet with standard
455Khz IF, where some feedback was added around an IF stage (usually a
"gimmick" capacitor so one can adjust it), and with control of the
cathode, one could increase selectivity and put it into oscillation so
there was something to beat against the incoming signals to demodulate CW
and SSB. But that's really just a more complicated method of regeneration
and superregeneration.

One of the problems with superregenerative receivers is that they were
long treated as a black box. ONce they fell out of leading edge circuity
(where they helped to homestead the higher bands), people forgot how they
worked and the book descriptions were pretty uninformative. I remember
one ARRL Handbook going into how the same active device could be the
receiver and the quenching oscillator, without explaining what the
quenching oscillator did.

That said, a superregenerative receiver is just a superset of a
regenerative receiver. Armstrong came up with the latter early on,
patented in 1914. It showed not only how to make a better receiver, but
how to make a tube oscillate, real cutting edge. Then later, when he was
on the eve of a court case over that regen patent, he went back to the
regen to remind himself about its operation, and came across a phenomena
that he'd noticed almost a decade earlier, but hadn't pursued. This was
superregeneration, and it happened with a regular regen receiver. It's
just kicking things further along. I'm sure some circuits are better to
get the quenching, but if you view the superregen as a regen receiver with
exteral quenching oscillator, it's all so much easier to visualize. The
quenching modulates the regen. If it's one device, the one device does
both, it's just a matter of getting the quenching going.

So the same receiver can be both. Indeed, in the late fifties or early
sixties, the ARRL had a popular VHF station construction series, using a
14MHz regen and converters. And they even say by adjuting regen, you can
use the receiver as a superregen.

You can't use superregeneration for receiving SSB and CW, but you can use
the same circuit, so long as it can be adjusted through regeneration to
actual feedback and beyond.

Michael