Now we get double conversion, SSB, reliable ICs, microprocessors & informative displays, stable operation, digital readout, SDR etc etc. I still prefer the ancient stuff though. Ingenious, charming & cranky are ok with me.
I wouldn't describe TRF as ingenious--it's more the Bigger Hammer approach, with lots of stability and tracking problems. Superregens and superhets, now _those_ were ingenious.
(Edwin Howard Armstrong is one of my technical heroes--besides both of those supers, he also invented FM, and as a boy he even invented the _oscillator_.)
I like early radio too--some of those components were real works of art, especially multi-gang variable caps with plates sculpted so as to give linear tuning with shaft angle for both RF and LO circuits at once. Besides, I've used a bunch of early radio techniques in optics, including making crystal radios that worked at 200 THz.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Given a 200T detector, did you make a superhet?
I've considered another receiver topology: locate a second antenna near the receive antenna, and short #2 with a diode driven by a square wave... sort of a chopper effect.
I didn't, but Christophe Fumeaux did it by mixing two CO2 laser lines near 30 THz, yielding an IF (in wires) up to 168 GHz.
That's more or less how my ACTJ modulator was supposed to work--see
Phil Hobbs
FWIW I think all the once new reception techniques were ingenious. I just don't enjoy the more modern ones. We only see them as not ingenious because they're familiar to us. Early radio did so much with so little.
There were electromechanical oscillators, negative resistance oscillators & rotating oscillators before Armstrong's.
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