Well if you have heard anything about Regens then you're either a rather experienced Ham, you're a fanatic about older radio equipment, you have one hell of an elmer, or just plain strange..

My reasons for researching (playing) with them are simple...

• High level discrimination
• High level rejection
• Homebrewable
• Can be built with an extreme minimum a parts
• I like the squeal from the "regen"
• I really like the squeal from my XYL when I play with the regen
• I have one hell of an elmer - sorry not old enough to remember them -- 30ish
• I'm strange..... or at least that's what I'm told.

My first real attempt..

Well after much pain suffering and many false starts, I built something. It was ugly. It didn't quite do what I wanted like receive anything but I'll call it a success. Here's it story...

I found a number of circuits available by many wonderful and knowledgeable experts, but I finally decided to build a radio based on one on WN6Q's site. The Barebones Regenny! Simply put no resistors two Capacitors, a 9v battery, an MPF102 FET, and a "bathroom tissue" tube rapped with two coils of wire...

I loved it simple ugly and supposedly it would work. I procured the necessary items and started the assembly process. I followed loosely the modifications to make it work in the HF bands as opposed to the Broadcast bands. This included my recalculating the needed inductance to go with my junk box Air cap. In looking at the schematic it appears that the use of High Z headphones is needed. A modification of adding a 2k resistor "across" the headphone plug will allow you to use crystal (?) headphones. Well I happened to have an audio transformer from Radio Shack at 8:1 so I used that instead...

I completed the assembly and powered it up.... NO SMOKE!!!! that's good....now the next step.... Nope no audio....

Well after fussing around I removed the transformer and just use my normal "walkman" headphones. After a bit of tweaking I was getting static but no signals. I then hooked my Z-match antenna tuner between it and the antenna. Well after a bit of knob turning now 3 plus the sliding tickle coil i still didn't get a signal, BUT channel 8 on my TV came and went.... I then hooked up a frequency counter and it did oscillate. Again twisting and turning I got about 10Mhz from it... I am still amazed.

I still can't get it to work as just the position of my hand 3 feet from the tuner will send it 5Khz out of tune but I proved to my self that I can build an oscillator, albeit a noisy unstable one.

On to the next project...

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