Discord is a kind of chat board where a group of people can create topic channels and basically talk back and forth in real time - if they wish.
Bill and Dean at Soldersmoke have embraced the form and created a fantastic place where many of us are sharing our issues, if they arise, and helping each other to debug things. The "smokers" are both there but also there's a good deal of constructors helping each other out.
My receiver has been re-built a few times and currently looks like this:
Bill urges us to stick to the design but some of us have had to substitute components or, in my case, due to the lack of an audio transformer that works, add a bit of extra audio gain in the form of an LM386 module.
Several builders have found that we get less output from the VFO than Bill or Dean do and the tell-tale squared off waveform at the input to the diode ring mixer isn't there. It's hard to know what the root cause is but presumably it's component variations or perhaps the "brass" screw material, which, in my case quenches oscillator level as it goes in to the coil. (Adding a 0.1uF cap across the resistor in the source of the buffer FET helps).
The Discord is broken out into channels for the oscillator, mixer, bandpass filter and audio amplifier.
You can join via this link (which will expire in a week). After that check out the Soldersmoke blog for new info.
Congratulations to Bill and Dean for this innovation.
My receiver is working quite well, thanks in particular to VK3ZZC who gave me some NP0 capacitors that have stopped the massive thermal drift in the VFO. It is very satisfying tuning 40m listening to stations - sounding really good - on a home made receiver.
If you are new to home brew radio construction, this is a good way to get started with a community of helpful people.
One important note, if you are going to attempt this project, there have been some changes to the schematic and the latest version is on the Discord in the #schematics channel.
