Built another NE602/LM386 Direct Conversion Receiver

In recent months I've been off in the land of software development and have been sadly ignoring the electronics workbench. To get me back in the mood I built another instance of the simple direct conversion receiver using two ICs described in Experimental Methods in RF Design.

NE602 mixer chips are a bit hard to find and the only ones I have are surface mount so you can see it on a little carrier board above. This design uses the on-chip oscillator. My tuning is extremely sensitive and will need some padding to give me band spread of just the 40m band. At this point I haven't tuned the front end and it's undoubtably way off so the receiver is quite deaf.

In the past I've built the, all discrete component, Soldersmoke Direct Conversion Receiver. That project is much more challenging than this little one but each has it's good ideas. I'm thinking of bringing over the PTO from Soldersmoke to this design just for fun (or perhaps over-thinking it and adding an Si5351 VFO!).

Here's the schematic.

(Click to enlarge).