[TenTec] Power Mite Odyssey

[Bill Fuqua]

At 02:29 PM 11/10/2003 +0000, johnwiseman at davidbowie.com wrote:
>Obviously,
>this receiver is not of the quality of even my first homebrew.

A friend requested that put together his original station. He had a VF-1, 
DX-20 and a SX110 receiver. I first go the SX110 for him and he tried it 
out. He called me and said he could not use it. He could not tell what 
frequency he was on or tune in SSB.  He recalled this being the best 
receiver he could have gotten and now it was awful. Our memory combined 
with our fond memories of the past are cloud our judgement from time to time.
      Now, your HB superheterodyne receiver was probably better than the 
direct conversion receiver. However,it seems today and then we may have 
used many more parts to achieve the same goals.  Look at the hundreds of 
transistors and IC's in even the simplest HF transceiver made by the major 
manufacturers in off shore. Power consumption is high and there trying to 
fix them is almost impossible.
      Sometimes I wonder if it would not be better to build into every 
transceiver a high Q antenna tuner and just do away with all the switched 
band pass filters as one example. Use the antenna tuner (matching network) 
do get rid of the harmonics. That is what we did with the tube transmitters 
but it was not automatic. Some military had automatic tuning. And did not 
even use microprocessors.
Just a few tubes and phase comparators.
     I like some of the minimal component designs today like the PIXIE2 and 
Rockmite and others. You can actually learn something when building them. 
Also, speaking of learning. ICOM and Drake do not include schematics or 
circuit descriptions in their manuals. You have to pay extra for service 
manuals.

73
Bill wa4lav