Wiring Material

This short-wave converter, which doesn’t have a single coil requiring alignment, is intended to enable simple medium-wave receivers to be used to listen to short-wave signals. The converter transforms the 49-m short-wave band to the medium-wave frequency of 1.6 MHz. At the upper end of the medium-wave band, select an unoccupied frequency that you want to use for listening to the converted short-wave signals. Good reception performance can be obtained using a wire antenna with a length of one to two metres.

Short-Wave Converter  Circuit Diagram

The converter contains a free-running oscillator with a frequency of around 4.4 MHz, which is tuned using two LEDs (which act as variable-capacitance diodes!) and a normal potentiometer. The frequency range is set by adjusting the emitter current using a 1k trimpot. The oscillator frequency depends strongly on the operating point. This is due to the combination of using an audio transistor and the extremely low supply voltage. Under these conditions, the transistor capacitances are relatively large and strongly dependent on the operating point. The second transistor forms the mixer stage.

If you calculate the resonant frequencies of the tuned diagram, you will obtain 6.7 MHz for the antenna schema and 1.7 MHz for the output schema. Additional transistor capacitance and the effects of the coupling capacitors shift each of the resonant frequencies downward. The tuned diagram are relatively heavily damped to obtain bandwidths that are large enough to allow the schema to be used without any specific alignment. The results are good despite the low collector–emitter voltage of around only 0.6 V, due to the fact that only a modest amount of mixer gain is necessary. The entire schema also draws less than 1mA.