The regenerative radio is long-ago superseded in commercial receivers, but it remains a common project for electronics or radio enthusiasts seeking to make a simple receiver. It’s most often seen for AM band receivers or perhaps shortwave ham band ones, but it’s a circuit which also works at much higher frequencies. [Perian Marcel] has done just this, with a regenerative receiver for the FM broadcast band.

The principle of a regenerative receiver is that it takes a tuned radio frequency receiver with a wide bandwidth and poor performance, and applies feedback to the point at which the circuit is almost but not quite oscillating. This has the effect of hugely increasing the “Q”, or quality factor of the receiver, giving it much more sensitivity and a narrow bandwidth. They’re tricky to tune but they can give reasonable performance, and they will happily slope-demodulate an FM transmission.

This one uses two tubes from consumer grade TV receivers, the “P” at the start of the part number being the giveaway for a 300mA series heater chain. The RF triode-pentode isn’t a radio part at all, instead it’s a mundane TV field oscillator part pushed into service at higher frequencies, while the other triode-pentode serves as an audio amplifier. The original circuit from which this one is adapted is available online, All in all it’s a neat project, and a reminder that exotic parts aren’t always necessary at higher frequencies. The video is below the break.

In the days before integrated circuits became ubiquitous, providing advanced functionality in a single package, designers became adept at extracting the maximum use from discrete components. They’d use clever circuits in which a transistor or other active part would fulfill multiple roles at once, and often such circuits would need more than a little know-how to get working. It’s not often in 2024 that we encounter this style of circuit, but here’s [Maurycy] with a cheap microwave radar module doing just that.

On the board is an RF portion with a single transistor, some striplines, and an SOIC chip. Oddly this last part turns out to be an infra-red proximity sensor chip, so what’s going on? Careful analysis of the RF circuit reveals something clever. As expected, it’s a 3.18 GHz oscillator, but how is it functioning as both transmitter and receiver? The answer comes in the form of a resistor and capacitor in the emitter circuit, which causes the transistor to also oscillate at about 20 kHz. The result is that at different times in the 20 kHz period, the transistor is either off, fully oscillating at 3.18GHz and transmitting, or briefly in the not-quite-oscillating state between the two during which it functions as a super-regenerative receiver. This is enough for one device to effectively transmit and receive at the same time with the minimum of parts, there’s no need for a mixer diode as you might expect if it were it a direct conversion receiver. Perhaps in RF terms, it’s not particularly pretty, but we have to admit to being impressed by its simplicity. He goes on to perform a few experiments with the board as a transmitter or as a more conventional radar.

This isn’t the first such radar module we’ve looked at, here’s one designed from scratch. And we love regens, since they are so simple to build.

Modern radio receivers have a distinct advantage over the common early designs which I covered in my previous article. Most of the receivers you will have worked with over the past couple decades are designs by Edwin Armstrong; regenerative, superregenerative, or most commonly superheterodyne. These are distinguished by a few fascinating key traits that bring both benefits and drawbacks.

Today let’s dive into Mr. Armstrong’s receivers. I’ll also talk about DC receivers which, despite the name, are not made to listen to batteries. These are receivers you are much more likely to encounter in modern equipment.

Regenerative and Superregenerative

The regenerative receiver is all about doing more with less. You still see some of these in simple applications like RF remote controls. The idea derives from how an oscillator works. In a simple way of thinking, an oscillator is an amplifier with enough positive feedback that any tiny signal at the right frequency will amplify and then, through feedback, continue to output over and over. If everything were perfect, then, an oscillator would have infinite gain at a given frequency.

Of course, things aren’t perfect, but they are close enough. You have to set the feedback network up just right to get the frequency you want. Also, things in nature tend to be linear, so it isn’t like the amplifier has no gain at the given frequency and then suddenly has infinite gain. The gain increases until it meets the Barkhausen criteria and achieves stable oscillation.

In fact, sometimes we want to build an amplifier and find that it oscillates for some reason. Maybe that’s what made Edwin Armstrong think about the regenerative receiver. In it, an amplifier is pushed almost to the point of oscillation at the frequency of interest. This can result in a huge gain for a single tube or transistor. This was especially important when using low-quality active devices. For example, a tube capable of a gain of 10 without regeneration might amplify between 5,000 and 10,000 times when it was right on the edge of oscillation.

That’s a big improvement and meant that a very simple device could pick up very distant radio signals. There are many ways you could arrange positive feedback. However, the most common way (as in the accompanying schematic) was to have a pickup coil called a tickler around the primary tuned circuit coil. If that coil was out of phase, you’d get negative feedback, so common advice on this kind of radio was that if it didn’t work after you built it, try reversing the leads of the tickler.

The superregenerative was another design by Armstrong. It is essentially the same circuit, but after a certain frequency higher than the bandwidth of interest, the design stops the oscillation action allowing it to build again. Armstrong called this quenching. This could improve gains into the neighborhood of a million times. Armstrong’s original demonstration of the concept showed a three-tube receiver that was as sensitive as a nine-tube conventional design.

There are some downsides to both of these designs, though. You usually have to adjust the regeneration and the circuit can easily go into oscillation, producing a squeal. It also radiates signal back out the antenna, so it is a sort of transmitter. This is bad for interference or — for military applications — where you wish not to be found. If you want to build your own, we’ve had some advice for you in the past, including some on a breadboard. If you prefer, you can just simulate one that [Qrp Gaijin] demonstrates in the video below.

Superheterodyne

Armstrong was also behind the most successful architecture of all, the superheterodyne. If you have a non-software defined radio, it probably uses this technique. The idea is simple and has to do with selectivity. Consider the TRF radio. You can get better performance by putting more stages ahead of the detector. But each stage has to cover the entire range of the radio and requires tuning when you change frequency.

Armstrong’s idea was to limit that. You may or may not have one relatively broad filter in front of a mixer that adds (and subtracts) two RF signals. Then a local oscillator provides another signal to the mixer. Suppose you want to receive a signal at 1 MHz and you set the local oscillator to 9 MHz. You’ll get a signal at 10 MHz (and 8 MHz). You can now filter that 10 Mhz signal and amplify it using filters and amplifiers that you don’t have to tune (at least, not more than once). This makes their design simple and is also less hassle for the operator.

Now, if you want to receive a signal at 1.1 MHz, you change the local oscillator to 8.9 MHz. You still get a 10 MHz signal. If there is a station at 1.2 MHz, you’ll also get a signal at 10.1 MHz, but since you have the 10 MHz filters and amplifiers, you can get rid of that easily. That 10 MHz, in this example, is the IF or intermediate frequency.

This is a great way to build a radio. You can pile on gain and selectivity by adding more IF stages. The only real downside, as I mentioned in the last article is the possibility of images. Because the mixer both adds and subtracts, you can hear a station at the wrong frequency. Consider our 1 MHz signal with a local oscillator frequency of 9 MHz. A 19 MHz signal at the antenna will also show up at the 10 MHz output of the mixer since 19-9=10, just like 1+9=10.

There are several ways to get over that. First, you can filter before the mixer. That’s why a lot of radios have a band switch — well, it is at least one of the reasons. You select a filter that roughly cuts out the interference from images. High-quality receivers will use dual conversion where one mixer produces one IF signal that is later mixed again to form a second one. Some will even use more conversions to optimize filtering.

There are several ways this can help. Image frequencies are always at twice the local oscillator frequency. Going back to the 1 MHz signal example, the image is at 2×9+1=19 MHz. So the higher the IF, the easier it is to filter off images. As a silly example consider if the 1 MHz receiver used an IF of 61 MHz. Now the local oscillator will run at 60 MHz and the image frequency will be at 121 MHz. It is trivial to filter 1 MHz from 121 MHz.

The problem is that using a higher IF makes it more difficult to reject stations adjacent in frequency. In our extreme example, filters to select between 61 MHz and 61.02 MHz are going to be more complex and costly than ones that select between 10 MHz and 10.02 MHz. Granted, there are surface acoustic wave filters and other devices that can do the job, but typically the best performance for a given cost is going to go to the lower frequency filters and amplifiers.

If you want a nice overview of the superheterodyne that isn’t too technical, check out the video below.

Direct Conversion

The direct conversion (DC) receiver has seen a resurgence in use since many software defined radios use this as a front end before digitizing the signal. You can think of a DC receiver as superheterodyne where the local oscillator doesn’t produce an IF, but instead is set to the frequency you want to receive. That means the output is the detected radio signal.

Using our 1 MHz example, to tune it in, you set the local oscillator to 1 MHz. The output is what you’d normally process with an audio amplifier (in the case of AM radio). The design has several practical problems. If the local oscillator isn’t locked to the transmitting station, the output will be incorrect. With SDR, that’s not a problem because the SDR software can track any shifts, but if you don’t have a computer handling things, it requires a lot of components to stay on frequency (essentially, a phase locked loop).

On the other hand, images are all at low frequencies and easily rejected. A lot of simple ham radio receivers use this technique because you don’t need a lot of frequency-specific amplifiers and filters that require tuning.

Getting Started Receiving

If you want to start designing receivers, the best bet is to build some and see how they work. It is hard to beat the simplicity and performance of a regenerative receiver. Sure, a crystal set is easier, but it won’t pick up like a regen. Using the NE602 or NE612 mixer is a handy way to make a direct conversion receiver with only a little more work. You can use that same mixer in a superhet design, but it is definitely more work.

Even if you are using SDR, you usually need some kind of front end. There are a few more exotic designs we didn’t talk about. If you want to read about Hartley, Barber Weaver, and other interesting topics, A Texas A&M presentation on the topic will fill you in.

Of course, the best way to learn is to go build something! There’s no shortage of design ideas for every kind of radio we’ve discussed. Once you start tweaking on real hardware, you’ll quickly find out what works and what doesn’t.

Acknowledgment: Most of the pretty pictures of block diagrams and schematics were adapted from public domain sources on Wikipedia, particularly from [Chetvorno]. What a great resource.

Chances are you have at least one radio that can receive FM stations. Even though FM is becoming less used now with Internet and satellite options, it still is more popular than the older AM radio bands. FM was the brainchild of an inventor you may have heard of — Edwin Armstrong — but you probably don’t know the whole story. It could make a sort of radio-themed soap opera. It is a story of innovation, but also a story of personal vanity, corporate greed, stubbornness, marital problems, and even suicide. The only thing missing is a long-lost identical twin sibling to turn it into a full telenovela.

Early Days

Armstrong grew up in New York and because of an illness that gave him a tic and caused him to be homeschooled, he was somewhat of a loner. He threw himself into his interest in electric and mechanical devices. By 1909 he was enrolled in Columbia University where professors noted he was very focused on what interested him but indifferent to other studies. He was also known as someone more interested in practical results than theory. He received an electrical engineering degree in 1913.

Unlike a lot of college graduates, Armstrong didn’t go work for a big firm. Instead, he set up a self-financed independent lab at Columbia. This sounded good because it meant that he would own the patents on anything invented there. But it would turn out to be a two-edged sword.

Tubes and Villians

Every good story needs a villain or two, and this one is no exception. The first one is Lee de Forest, the man who invented the triode. History hasn’t painted de Forest kindly, and some of the reasons for that are because of his interactions with Armstrong. However, there’s more than that.

Technically, Thomas Edison invented the vacuum tube as an offshoot of experimenting with light bulbs. He knew electrons were streaming away from the filament and put an electrode in — what we would call a plate — to collect them. He didn’t have any real idea what to do with the device, though.

In 1904 John Fleming realized that the device operated like a check valve allowing current to flow in one direction but not the other and demonstrated using it as a rectifier. This is why people in some parts of the world call tubes Fleming valves.

What de Forest added to the mix was to put a grid between the filament and the plate. He was actually trying to build a radio detector that used ionized gasses and filed a patent on a two-terminal device in 1907. The grid was initially on the outside of the glass tube, which didn’t work well. Once it was moved inside the tube, it allowed a small signal on the grid to be amplified at the plate. De Forest called this tube the audion. There were a few reasons it didn’t work very well, not the least of which is that de Forest erroneously thought that having a little gas left in the tube was essential for its operation. We know now, you want less gas, not more.

This all fits in with the historical accounts that de Forest didn’t fully understand the tube. He was just trying different things to see what would work — not always a bad thing, especially in those days where others worked with a similar methodology. He even reportedly said:

I have arrived, as yet, at no completely satisfactory theory as to the exact means by which the high-frequency oscillations affect so markedly the behavior of an ionized gas.

If he was just a practical inventor, that wouldn’t make him a villain, though. However, when Marconi, who held the Fleming patent, sued that the audion infringed, de Forest took the position that the two devices were completely different. Of course, they were not. A court sided with Marconi although since the grid was a patentable improvement, so the two sides agreed to exchange rights.

We think of protracted court battles over intellectual property as a modern problem. Perhaps it is true that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Back to Armstrong

Armstrong grew up experimenting with gassy low-quality audions. He was determined to understand how the device worked in a scientific way. While at Columbia he did comprehensive studies and found that using positive feedback could create much higher amplification — enough to drive speakers instead of headphones. This is the basis behind a regenerative receiver. The signal is amplified many times over getting stronger each time. In addition, Armstrong learned that if you increase the feedback, you get sustained oscillations. This would be a huge breakthrough for radio to have a reliable way to generate radio waves electronically.

Armstrong filed for a patent in 1913. Lee de Forest predictably discounted Armstrong’s work for a few years. Then in a surprise move in 1915 he filed patents for the same inventions claiming he had priority because of a lab notebook he had dated in 1912. World War I intervened, however, so things moved slowly.

Regenerative receivers were sold until another Armstrong invention would replace them. Regens are still popular with hackers because they generally have a very low parts count. If you want to learn more about how they work, check out Stan’s video analysis of one based on a FET which isn’t very different from a tube.

War Time

During the war, Armstrong also developed the superheterodyne receiver: a common architecture even today where a frequency of interest is converted to a single intermediate frequency for amplification and filtering prior to detection.

By 1919 Armstrong was in court on two fronts on the de Forest patents. To finance his legal fees, he had licensed several companies to make regenerative receivers for amateurs and experimentation. He was also shopping for a big corporation to buy the rights. Westinghouse wound up with both the regenerative and superheterodyne patents. By 1928, the courts would actually decide a Frenchmen named Lévy invented the superheterodyne first.

The Regenerative Patent

The legal front on regeneration was quite different. Both the court and the patent office decided that de Forest’s patents were not valid. However, Armstrong didn’t want to settle for the compensation offered by de Forest. This allowed de Forest to appeal the case, which he eventually won through two further appeals up to the Supreme Court.

This move shocked most people in the radio business at the time. Armstrong attempted to return an award he received from the IRE (the Institute of Radio Engineers) and the institute refused to accept the return, publically stating they rejected the court’s findings.

Although Armstrong didn’t do well in court, he did have a little luck. While dealing with the legal end of things, he stumbled on an improvement to regeneration called super regeneration. That patent netted him $200,000 and 80,000 shares of RCA stock which made him the largest shareholder. Keep in mind, too, that $200,000 in 1922 was a fortune. RCA wound up never actually producing radios using this technology, as the superheterodyne turned out to be far superior.

Which Brings us to FM…

In case you forgot, all this was leading into the invention of FM radio. AM radio is very prone to noise and fading because these show up as changes in amplitude — the A in AM. During the 1920s, Armstrong was trying to think of ways to improve AM radio. FM — modulating frequency instead of amplitude — had been largely dismissed because of an incomplete analysis of FM done by John Carson showing that FM would not improve on the quality of AM.

By 1928, Armstrong started working with FM despite its detractors, and the key was using a wider bandwidth. Armstrong filed for patents in 1933. RCA had the right of first refusal on his patents by this time, but they were unimpressed with a system that was complex and was not compatible with existing equipment.

Armstrong went to smaller radio companies like General Electric and Zenith. He also got the FCC to allocate a band for this new kind of radio with 40 channels in the 42 to 50 MHz range. You might notice that this isn’t where the FM band is today. That will play a part in the story to come. There’s a lot of pictures of old FM radios, for this band online. Oddly enough, this band displaced another attempt to do “better” radio called Apex radio — a topic we will cover in the near future.

The Million Dollar Question

At first, RCA saw FM as a threat to their existing businesses and did everything they could to prevent Armstrong from demonstrating the system to the public. Despite this, Armstrong did get the FCC interested in FM and even built his own FM station W2XMN to help get things moving.

The first broadcast was in 1939. There were only 25 FM receivers in the world at that time, so the audience wasn’t very large.

RCA finally wanted to get into the FM game, but they didn’t want to pay Armstrong royalties. In 1940, they offered him a cool million dollars for a non-exclusive but royalty-free license. Armstrong didn’t feel like it was fair to other companies that were paying 2% on their sales. He refused and this would become a fateful and ultimately pointless decision.

To the right, you can see a magazine cover from 1940. The picture shows a million volt arc that totally ruins AM reception but didn’t interfere at all with the FM radio.

Band Adjustment

Because of World War II, there were comparatively few FM receivers and stations in service on the new frequency band. I say comparatively because ultimately there would be nearly 400,000 receivers in service compared with millions of AM radios.

Signals around 50 MHz are subject to propagation effects that can cause interference. RCA lobbied fiercely to move the FM band and Armstrong vigorously countered it. In his opinion, RCA only wanted to disrupt the existing base of FM stations and receivers, perhaps because he wasn’t willing to take their million dollar offer.

Since you know the current FM band is from 88 to 108 MHz, you can probably guess which side won in 1945. Still, Armstrong was convinced that FM was the future and even hired a public relations firm to spread the word about FM’s superiority.

RCA would eventually develop what they claimed were non-infringing FM patents and even encouraged other companies to stop paying royalties to Armstrong. He sued, but RCA was able to tie the case up for years.

The Bitter End

The two obvious villains in this story were de Forest and David Sarnoff of RCA. However, there’s a third villain: the courts. Being constantly embroiled in legal battles with a giant company takes its toll on your pocketbook and on your mental health.

Facing bankruptcy, Armstrong approached his wife Marion (who had been, by the way, David Sarnoff’s secretary) about returning money he had given her to put aside for their retirement. She refused and in 1954 he took a swing at her with a fire poker. Unsurprisingly, she left him.

Armstrong lived in an apartment on the 13th floor of the New York River House. With his wife gone and three servants done for the day, Armstrong removed an air conditioning unit, put on a nice suit, a hat, overcoat, and gloves. Then after writing a two-page note, he walked out the window, plummeting to his death on a third-floor balcony. The New York Times reported that he was heartbroken over the loss of his wife and regretted hurting her.

It is ironic that Armstrong turned down the million dollars. After his death, Marion settled with RCA for — what else — a million dollars. She also pursued other court cases, defending his patents and receiving infringement awards from other manufacturers. FM would really take off after General Electric added stereo to FM in the late 1950s.

A sad end to a prolific inventor that created a lot of technology we still use today. It is hard to say for sure if the villains in a story like this were really as bad as they appear or just unable to present their side of the story. On the other hand, history is written by the victors and Armstrong certainly wasn’t the victor. That’s got to mean something.

As I was writing this, though, one thing did strike me. Most of the world — including the United States — has gone to a patent system where “first to file” gets priority. I’ve always thought that is bad for us hackers because we are less likely to quickly file patents and, thus, more likely to get knocked out by a big company spewing out dozens of patent disclosures a day. But this is a case where first to file might have totally changed Armstrong’s life for the better. It also reminds me that even though most of us don’t file patents often, maybe we should think about it. Maybe big companies are going to control all the upcoming innovations because — unlike Armstrong — we are letting them.

Photo credits:

Audion Tube by Gregory F. Maxwell GFDL 1.2

AM/FM Animation by Berserkerus CC BY-SA 2.5

Tube radios have a certain charm. Waiting for them to warm up, that glow of the filaments in a dark room. Tubes ruled radio for many decades. [Uniservo] posted a video about the history and technology behind the 1920’s era Clapp-Eastham C-3 radio. This is a three-tube regenerative receiver and was advanced for its day.

If you are worried he won’t open it up, don’t despair. Around the ten minute mark, your patience will be rewarded. Inside are three big tubes full of getter and bus bars instead of wires. Add to that the furniture-quality case, and this is a grand old radio.

One interesting thing about this receiver is that it uses a special kind of transformer known as a variocoupler where a coil rotates inside another to adjust the regeneration. It turned out that the tubes were newer than the radio, so [Uniservo] replaced them with more age-appropriate tubes.

Unfortunately, the radio is silent for now because of open audio transformers. We hope he’ll get it working and make another video of it actually operating.

Regenerative receivers have pretty good amplification performance with a low parts count. That’s because the amplifier operates near oscillation where the gain at the selected frequency is very high. It is pretty easy to build your own using technology a little newer than these tubes. If you want to dive into the theory, we’ve done that, too.

When a Hackaday article proclaims that its subject is a book you should read, you might imagine that we would be talking of a seminal text known only by its authors’ names. Horowitz and Hill, perhaps, or maybe Kernigan and Ritchie. The kind of book from which you learn your craft, and to which you continuously return to as a work of reference. Those books that you don’t sell on at the end of your university career.

So you might find it a little unexpected then that our subject here is a children’s book. Making A Transistor Radio, by [George Dobbs, G3RJV] is one of the huge series of books published in the UK under the Ladybird imprint that were a staple of British childhoods for a large part of the twentieth century. These slim volumes in a distinctive 7″ by 4.5″ (180 x 115 mm) hard cover format were published on a huge range of subjects, and contained well written and informative text paired with illustrations that often came from the foremost artists of the day. This one was published at the start of the 1970s when Ladybird books were in their heyday, and has the simple objective of taking the reader through the construction of a simple three transistor radio. It’s a book you must read not because it is a seminal work in the vein of Horrowitz and Hill, but because it is the book that will have provided the first introduction to electronics for many people whose path took them from this humble start into taking the subject up as a career. Including me as it happens, I received my copy in about 1979, and never looked back.

When you open the book, the first thing you see sets the tone, for there is a guide to soldering on the inside of the front cover. This is an optional construction method, but it is presented in a style that does not talk down to the reader. You are here to learn about electronics, not to be reminded that you are a child.

Past the title page, and the you are introduced to radio shown a block diagram of a receiver, and then simple circuitry with a torch (flashlight) battery and bulb as a first example. You are then launched into your first radio circuitry, first with a tuned circuit and then with the addition of a germanium point-contact diode and earpiece, a simple crystal set. One of the first illustrations shows a young boy wearing a shirt and tie, typical of the slightly idealised world of children’s’ books of the era. This was the 1970s, just how many boys would have been dressed like that, really!

Despite the introduction to soldering inside the cover, the signature construction method used in the book is the use of woodscrews and screwcups on a wooden baseboard. The reader is introduced to these, and the tools the might have to master, before being shown the measurements for the board. With this complete, we are ready for our first construction, the crystal set with its coil wound on a ferrite rod.

It is easy to believe these days that children are shielded from anything that might be remotely practical, for fear that they might hurt themselves. Fortunately the ethos of this book has its roots in a far more can-do era, and an action such as fracturing a ferrite rod to create the 3″ (75mm) length required is taken in its stride. Again, the reader is not talked down to, being introduced to all the useful things you need to know if you are to maintain an interest in radio. Few other children’s books deal with the topic of standard wire gauges.

Once constructed, the crystal set and its associated aerial (antenna) and earth would have given the 1970s child an instant result, as over most of the more populous parts of the British mainland they would have easily received the strongest AM signal, BBC Radio 2. A crystal set is hardly selective, so it’s quite likely that no matter where it was tuned it would still pick up Radio 2. Still, the sense of achievement at having pulled a signal out of thin air would have been very strong. As an exercise the book takes a brief diversion into home-made radios as created by WW2 prisoners of war with a detector made from a piece of coke.

The book then adds amplification to the crystal set in a series of stages which culminate in driving a small loudspeaker. This section is more than simply the stages of amplifier construction though, because while it takes the reader through those steps it is also a very basic primer on electronic components and transistor circuits. The amplifier is a very old-fashioned, single-ended design with an output transformer. The transistors in question are the now-archaic germanium PNP devices that had probably already been superseded by the early 1970s, but the principles of biasing and transistor circuitry are universal to all bipolar circuits. And the introduction to resistors with the resistor colour code  is something that stays with a young future electronic engineer throughout their career.

Finally, the reader is shown a regenerative front end for their radio that replaces the crystal set. The operation of regeneration is explained, new components are introduced, and the construction is laid out. There follows a guide to using the radio, and finally a page on finishing its case with a mounting for both speaker and battery. The final receiver might not have been as good as its commercial superhetrodyne equivalent, but it would have provided acceptable performance to receive most strong AM stations.

This book has only 50 pages, and of those, half are composed of pictures and diagrams. Within this meagre canvas the author manages to not only guide the reader through the construction of a working radio receiver, but to also lay the seeds of an understanding of solid state electronics. Topics such as the resistor colour code or transistor biasing are part of the early syllabus of a first-year electronic engineering course, yet here we find them presented in a children’s book in a format that a younger reader would understand. You are reading this review because my career as an electronic engineer has its roots in this book, it would be interesting to know how many other readers will tell the same story.

Making A Transistor Radio was published in 1972, and appeared as a second edition in Ladybird’s Learnabout series at the end of the decade. Some of the devices it uses may well have been out of production by the end of its print run; even in 1979 it proved difficult to source an OC44 and we had to use an AF117 instead. The book is now long out of print, so your best bet if you want to read it yourself is to do a Google search on its title for a PDF, or to scour second-hand booksellers. There is a copy on the Internet Archive, though it has some missing pages. The book’s author, [George Dobbs, G3RJV], continues to be a prolific writer and source of radio projects. As founder of the G-QRP Club, he has been very active in furthering the cause of low-power amateur radio.

It would be interesting to see how easily a contemporary version of the book could be created, with silicon transistors, Schottky signal diodes, and a polyvaricon to replace the Jackson Dilecon variable capacitor.  Or perhaps an AM radio is no longer enough to capture the imagination of a child. Ladybird stopped producing children’s books in this format in 1999, though they have recently re-emerged in a humorous form aimed at adults.

If you were introduced to electronics by this book, let us know in the comments. Do you still have your radio? If there are any other similar books that made the same mark for non-Brits, we’d love to hear about them.

When we build an electronic project in 2016, the chances are that the active components will be integrated circuits containing an extremely large amount of functionality in a small space. Where once we might have used an op-amp or two, a 555 timer, or a logic gate, it’s ever more common to use a microcontroller or even an IC that though it presents an analog face to the world does all its internal work in the digital domain.

There was a time when active components such as tubes or transistors were likely to be significantly expensive, and integrated circuits, if they even existed, were out of the reach of most constructors. In those days people still used electronics to do a lot of the same jobs we do today, but they relied on extremely clever circuitry rather than the brute force of a do-anything super-component. It was not uncommon to see circuits with only a few transistors or tubes that exploited all the capabilities of the devices to deliver something well beyond that which you might expect.

One of the first electronic projects I worked on was just such a circuit. It came courtesy of a children’s book, one of the Ladybird series that will be familiar to British people of a Certain Age: [George Dobbs, G3RJV]’s Making A Transistor Radio. This book built the reader up through a series of steps to a fully-functional 3-transistor Medium Wave (AM) radio with a small loudspeaker.

Two of the transistors formed the project’s audio amplifier, leaving the radio part to just one device. How on earth could a single transistor form the heart of a radio receiver with enough sensitivity and selectivity to be useful, you ask? The answer lies in an extremely clever circuit: the regenerative detector. A small amount of positive feedback is applied to an amplifier that has a tuned circuit in its path, and the effect is to both increase its gain and narrow its bandwidth. It’s still not the highest performance receiver in the world, but it’s astoundingly simple and in the early years of the 20th century it offered a huge improvement over the much simpler tuned radio frequency (TRF) receivers that were the order of the day.

The simplicity of a regenerative receiver did not come without problems though. The coupling adjustment became a small variable capacitor in later designs, and this could be found as a regeneration control on the front panel of a typical receiver. At every retune to a different station this would require readjustment for best performance, resulting in tuning a regenerative radio becoming something of a black art. In addition, if poorly adjusted they could sometimes oscillate and become transmitters in their own right. When the more complex but superior superhetrodyne receivers (another Armstrong invention) arrived around a decade later the popularity of regenerative receivers went into decline, and they had almost entirely disappeared by the end of the 1930s. Today they survive in niches such as amateur radio, toy walkie-talkies, toy electronics kits, and unexpectedly in very cheap UHF remote control modules.

It is this last application that points to one of the regenerative detector’s useful features. While most regenerative receivers are designed for AM broadcasts, the principle works at almost any frequency. It is possible to simply construct receivers using the principle that extend well into the UHF spectrum, and though they aren’t the best receivers on the block they can surprise you with their performance. [Roger Lapthorn, G3XBM] for example has published simple designs for a range of transceivers for the VHF bands with regenerative receivers, including the rather minimalist 2 metre (144MHz) “Fredbox”.

The regenerative receiver may not be the most advanced receiver ever conceived, and it certainly isn’t the most sensitive. But it’s one of those circuits that everyone should consider trying once, for its simplicity and ingenuity, and because it delivers results for relatively little effort. Go on, have one on your bench!

[Header image 1920s regenerative receiver, Charles William Taussig [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]