After experiencing some undesirable receiver behaviors during a station demo at the Breezeshooters Hamfest, I decided to dig into the homebrew 1934 superhet to try and resolve the issues as well as try some improvements.  The receiver was knocked far enough out of alignment during the trip to the hamfest to cause one of the IF tubes to break into oscillation when the gain control was advanced to a certain point.  That was easy enough to fix with a complete re-alignment.

Another annoying issue was an intermittent “raspiness” that would develop on CW notes.  Perhaps a bad solder joint, dirty tube socket wipers, etc.  Ultimately, this particular problem was resolved while troubleshooting another issue that I hadn’t noticed before.  When I powered up the receiver on the bench after returning home, I noticed a very high pitched note (perhaps 10-12 kHz) in the audio.  In trying to identify the source, I touched the grid cap of each tube.  The signal stopped when I got to the BFO tube.  After swapping in a different 57, the high pitched note was gone.  Subsequently, so was any further intermittent raspiness.

There were a number of improvements I decided to implement while I had the rig on the bench.  Continue reading …..