Regen Receiver with Few Parts

We like regenerative receivers. They perform well and they are dead simple to create. Example? [Radio abUse] modified a few existing designs and built a one-transistor receiver. Well, one transistor if you don’t count the dozens that are probably on the audio amplifier IC, but we won’t quibble. You can watch a video about the simple receiver — which looks good on a neatly done universal board — below.

The coil of #22 wire dominates the visual layout, and we imagine winding it might have been the most time-consuming part of the project. The layout would work with a single-sided PCB and would be a great board to produce by hand if you were inclined to develop that skill.

Regenerative receivers work by holding an amplifier just shy of oscillating at a certain frequency. This provides extremely high gain at a particular frequency which allows just a single stage to really pull in signals.

We were a little sad to find out there was a plan to tear the radio down to build something else. But, we suppose, that’s progress. We’d be tempted to make a module out of the audio amplifier and then keep the RF section intact. But, then again, we have a lot of partial projects like that gathering dust on the shelf, so maybe that’s not such a great idea.

While regenerative receivers aren’t the most common architecture today, they still have their place. The inventor, Edwin Armstrong, developed quite a bit of radio tech that we still use today.