KC9KEP - A work in progress

  Homebrew Radio Projects - Doerle Signal Gripper

The Deorle series of radios were very nicely designed.

This is an early homebrew fabrication technique called "bread boarding" for obvious reasons!

I used a Mahogany base, tung oiled it, and then applied Shellac.  (Did you know that Shellac is made from the excretions of an African insect and alcohol?)

This design features a stage of tuned RF prior to the detector and audio amplifier.

This really changes the way the radio "handles".  Gobs more volume, and tuning becomes a three-handed affair.

You see, the controls like to interact .. which can be good, or bad depending on your point of view!

One "con" is that the radio requires 2-tuned coils for each band that you want to receive.  And, later generations used a better antenna coupling method that added another winding on the coil forms.

I added the DC meter so that I could see when I've got the rheostat adjusted to the obligatory 2 VDC filament voltage.

This was my first laser-engraved front panel.

Other features included home-made RF chokes and coupling capacitors.

The batteries are really D-Cells inside of a cardboard photo copy of the real thing :-)