In article ,
D Peter Maus wrote:

I remember, after several months playing with my S-53A, tuning
through a ham band, hearing that duck quack that could only be SSB
without a BFO, and pulling up the toggle marked 'CW.' Slowly tuning
across the band--actually, I was looking for CW on the lower end--I
heard one of the ducks become intelligible for an instant.

That got my attention.

I went back and tried to duplicate that moment by tuning very slowly
through any of duck quacking I could find. And I did succeed, on the
80 meter band, in receiving SSB, with the CW BFO. Working my way
through the HF spectra, I succeeded in other bands as well. I was
about at 40 meters when my grandfather walked to the door.

"Do you know what you've done, here?"

I didn't have a clue.

So, he explained it to me. But I was convinced that given the CW
offset of the BFO, that I would only be able to receive LSB. USB
would be outside the passband.

Um...not so much.

The BFO had been zero beat tuned with incoming carriers by previous
owners. Which meant I could pull both USB and LSB through the
relatively narrow IF (though wide by comparison to today's sets.)

It was one of the most exciting discoveries I'd made in my limited
radio experience back then.

The next time I was at my grandfather's house, he took me down to
his radio room and let me play with his big boy toys. The Hammarlund
(which I have now,) a pair of RME's, and an FM tuner by
Hallicrafters.

I've rarely had that much fun with radio. Especially getting to
swing that big-ass tri bander around in the back yard.

Things accelerated pretty quickly from there. And got out of control
right away.



Anyone have similar moments of discovery/revelation?

That's the way single side band detection works Peter. You have to mix
a local carrier (the BFO) with the SSB signal so the detector can
demodulate it. For SSB mode in most receivers the BFO is fixed (on less
expensive radios it is the clarifier) and the detector is set to look
at the selected side band but in the older radios you can (as you found
out) use the AM envelope detector as well. This usually works just fine
on the older radios as long as the hams using the band stick to using
one side band.

--
Telamon
Ventura, California