High (Audio) Quality AM Tuner

I had made a regenerative receiver with tubes, which is published in another forum, in this site. Also, they have better audio quality than the medium AM standard receiver, but this project demonstrated myself that a well designed superhet can also give good audio signals. Yesterday, I listened to it about 8 hours, and is pleasant, much more than the SS I have constructed several years ago, using TDA1220 and TDA 7211 for FM front end.

I have taken also, a couple of short videos to show how the screen regulator works (much better and lower noisier than a VR tube), and how with some few volts, the AGC can control a strong local signal, and with the antenna shorted.

In fact, can anybody tell me if the ferrite rod is an antenna or an aerial, and which is the difference between them?

many thanks for reading and comment here.
 
Last edited:
No, I'm argentine, and grandson of italians.

Banfield is the town I was born, and actually I still live there. My nick, "Osvaldo de Banfield" stands for "Osvaldo from Banfield", in spanish.

Ing Edward Banfield was an engineer who work in the installation of the railroad, and a station has his name, which after him, the entire town received his name. People says that he never known the area, and never stay there.

See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Banfield_(railroad_engineer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banfield,_Buenos_Aires
 
I can't tell you exactly, because I lack of instrumental needed to make some affirmation. But aurally, it sounds much better that my older with IC's. The high frequencies of the S's, for example, are clearly defined, and almost as good as an FM transmission, particularly when speaking is a woman.

The T filter in the detector, is a key in this point, as defines much more accurately than the IF channel, because it doesn't move (bandwidth) with AGC changes.
 
Some of the tuners built with ICs in the '70s could only manage 2kHz 😱 .

You could record the line output of your tuner with an audio interface and have a look at the spectrogram in Audacity.

As an example, the image attached shows a spectrogram of an 84 year old 78rpm record, with a recorded bandwidth of 6kHz.
 

Attachments

  • 78rpm bandwidth.jpg
    78rpm bandwidth.jpg
    204.1 KB · Views: 187
May be. When I made such a receiver, I used ceramic resonators and IFT's rescued from other circuits, and I never checked its BW. It was about 20 years ago, and in the middle I learned much more than I knew to this moment.
AM BW appears to be 10KHz here.

Some time ago, radio stations used the odd tenth's of KHz, say, 710, 750, 790KHz. But from about a decade, also even tent's were raising, 720, 740, 760KHz and so on.
 
Last edited:
Osvaldo de Banfield said:
In fact, can anybody tell me if the ferrite rod is an antenna or an aerial, and which is the difference between them?
There is no difference. 'Aerial' was the original English name used, as a shortened version of 'aerial wire' - which means the wire put up in the air. 'Antenna' is now the preferred word used in electronic engineering. Most lay people continue to say 'aerial'. They mean exactly the same thing.

Strictly speaking, the antenna or aerial is just the part which actually interacts with the electromagnetic field; the rest is the 'support' or 'mast'. However, common usage calls the whole thing standing outside a transmitter building an 'aerial'.
 
Received spectrum of one of the AM stations I support, taken minutes ago. The tuner is an Inovonics modulation monitor with deemphasis enabled.
I also have a Denon TU-660NAB next to my desk. 🙂
 

Attachments

  • am_inovonics_mod_monitor.jpg
    am_inovonics_mod_monitor.jpg
    119.4 KB · Views: 176