A good morning's work. As part of the preparations for finally going on the air, and to enable the receiver to interconnect properly with the transmitter through the external homebrew transmit/receive switch that is under construction, I made three improvements:
(1) Addition of a reed relay for fully muting the RF stage during transmit, while still allowing monitoring of the transmitter's sidetone generator through the receiver's headphones or speakers. I added this feature because shorting the receiver's antenna input during transmit wasn't enough; the transmitter's RF was getting through and overloading the receiver, drowning the sidetone. This type of overloading is typical of regenerative receivers.
(2) Addition of an SO-239 antenna connector, to facilitate connection to the future external T/R switch.
(3) Addition of an on-off switch for the speaker amp stage, to allow easy choice of speaker, headphones or both.
While I was about it, I replaced the temporary back panel with a shiny new one....
At this point the receiver is "QSO-ready"!
Chaper Eleven, "Adding a T/R Relay, Antenna Connector and Speaker Switch," is here:
http://tinyurl.com/nnwro8h.
73 de Martin, KB1WSY