Hey, RedOwl; I know this is an old post and don't know if you're still be on the group and with this situation, but your comment about the HOA intrigues me. My day job is in the broadcast equipment business, and I get all sorts of trivia pushed into my email basket from the likes of the FCC and the groups that lobby them. From what I read, an HOA cannot forbid an outdoor or rooftop receive antenna that enables reception of a signal that cannot be picked-up clearly without it. HOAs have been forced by the FCC to cave on numerous occasions when it came to TV antennas, but the likelihood of HOAs having to deal with radio-only antennas is probably minuscule. Of course they can forbid your mounting it to certain things that you don't own outright, and would probably do so. But if you have an outside balcony, or if you are in a single-family dwelling, you should be within your rights to erect a short flat-top or fractional-wavelength dipole. Of course being accommodating yourself is always advised; some TV antennas with a blue anodize makes them almost invisible during the day.

It's amazing what can be done with 3D printing nowadays. That panel and chassis are beautiful work. This technology gives us experimenters the ability to make 'finished' one-offs. If only these techniques had been available back when I was in high school, the perfect girlfriend would have been no problem.

W5JAG: I can confirm that my company does indeed have excess surplus stock of those Kwang Sung FM tuner modules, and would be delighted to supply small quantities at a price of $7.20 each, plus shipping; doubtless would offer a discount on quantities. I can't immediately confirm that ours are the same model number as these are in obsolete stock at another location. They may depart slightly as they mount vertically on the board rather than laying flat... I think. I do recall that the last ones we bought needed a higher tuning voltage than the +9V in our product to tune to the top of the band. We bootlegged-in +12V from a second regulator and that worked just fine. They are a good tuner and work well with any of the available ceramic filters and monolithic IF chips like the obsolete RCA one you used. Let me know if you have interest and I can supply further instructions. -Jim

I'll be a way for a few days but will definitely fire this up before or during the coming weekend. That translated blog is interesting, and brings up a point I'd wondered about; that is, the length of the lead-in. The antenna comes with what looks like 20-30 feet of RG58, and the instructions don't touch on additional length. That's probably enough to get out of a noisy home environment, but not enough for a roof mount here. I would think that, "matched" to a 50-ohm line or not, additional cable capacitance would tend to negate the advantage of any passive impedance-matching in the sealed antenna base mount. I ran across a rather comprehensive overview of active E- and H-field antennas at g8jnj.net that seems to answer a number of questions.

Thanks for posting all that. Should make it easy for anyone to duplicate what's probably a quite good receiver. I know that Korean front-end; my company used it in an FM Modulation Monitor for broadcasters. That monitor product is being superseded by an SDR-based design this year, and we'll probably have a surplus of those tuners if anyone's interested... I believe we bought them in lots of 500 for a few bucks each. The mod-monitor was a dual-conversion design with a first IF at 10.7MHz and a second at 700kHz. FM demodulation was accomplished with a 'pulse-counting' scheme adapted from a circuit in the British RSGB's equivalent of the ARRL Handbook. ±75kHz deviation at 700kHz yields an impressive S/N figure. Being an old timer I have my suspicions of 'them newfangled digital chips,' not the least of which is that they are single-sourced and often hard to find in stock. That analog monitor will have had almost a 20-year run. In the beginning we used a Telefunken tuner, but they became unavailable and the Korean ones actually constituted an improvement at a much lower cost.

I agree. An active whip generally loads the short antenna with several megohms; I don't think you can drive 50 ohms very well without a FET follower. I do have one of those whips on order, however, and will be interested in trying it out. Not cheap. http://www.apexradio.co.jp/303WA-2_e.html I've had variable success with active whips in the past, the best being a McKay/Dymek back in the '80s. It's probably still on the roof of the house I was living in back then. One question on electrically-short antennas, perhaps you know the answer. If one does use a very small whip, like just part of a circuit board as in the popular PA0RDT design, would a correspondingly-small electrostatic shield (maybe two-foot diameter wire screen) grounded and placed underneath the antenna, not as a ground plane but simply as a shield, attenuate noise from directly below the antenna without compromising performance? I'm thinking of noise radiating from house wiring in the attic, where the antenna is on the roof above. Ideas?

Good deal! Looks intriguing; sharpen that pencil and grab the yellow, lined pad! It does look to use a commercial front-end. Are those still available? I wonder what it would take to roll one's own.

I've had experience with the 'one-chip-wonder' radios for FM; they are remarkable in performance and give you signal metrics that would be hard to derive otherwise. But these still require some peripheral chips and, as you remarked, Larry, are near-impossible to even see, let alone solder-down to a board or otherwise make connection to. Moreover, these are typical in-demand consumer parts, usually single-sourced, and many are either out of stock with suppliers or already have been superseded by an 'improved' successor that hasn't been released quite yet. I, personally, like to work with time-tested, always-available discrete components that, if I drop them on the floor, I can find, pick up and keep on truckin'. W5JAG, how about some particulars on the design? Is this a bare-bones-minimum radio or is it the performance equivalent of a home hi-fi? MPX-out for stereo decoding? Fairly sensitive? More info, please.

Are we talking a 'performance' receiver, or one using these ubiquitous SDR chips? If it's a real radio, with coils and caps, I'm definitely interested.