Improving the Heathkit HR-10B Receiver

UPDATE:  24 April 2012.  Just updated the schematic, which had an error (the source pin of the MPF102 oscillator should connect directly to T5 pin 2).  The new schematic is Rev. 2 (the old schematic was Rev. 1).

The Heathkit HR-10B is a 5-band, 7-tube amateur radio receiver manufactured from 1967 to 1975 and the companion to Heathkit's DX-60B transmitter. Essentially, the HR-10B design is the same as its predecessor, the HR-10 -- the only change seems to be that the top cover was painted with a wrinkly finish rather than the smooth finish of the original HR-10. It requires an external speaker or headphones.

I've always like the way the Heathkit HR-10 series receivers looked with their functional control layout and slide-rule dial. I picked this one up for a reasonable price, and I thought I'd give it a try. Powering it up, I immediately noticed a number of problems:

• Slide Rule Dial tracking diverged greatly on 80 meters.
• Receive frequency changed significantly as "RF Gain" was varied.
• Couldn't use AGC (AVC) for SSB/CW modes.
• Broad Selectivity.
• Deaf on 15 and 10 meters.

From my internet research, these problems seemed to be common. Not a very good receiver, and it got me wondering...was there anything I could do to improve it?

Slide Rule Dial not tracking on 80 Meters.

If I calibrated the HF oscillator at the 3.5 MHz mark on the dial and then tuned up in frequency , I found that as I tuned towards 4 MHz, I would hear a 4 MHz signal at about the 3.96 MHz dial mark. In other words, as I tuned through the band the oscillator diverged significantly from the scale markings.

The tuning capacitor, when the dial is at 3.5 MHz, is at maximum capacitance. The fact that I'm receiving a 4 MHz signal at the 3.96 MHz dial tick tells me that the capacitance of the tuning capacitor has decreased too much as I rotated the dial.

One way to fix this is to add additional parallel capacitance to the 80-meter oscillator tank circuit so that , as the variable capacitor is tuned, the the overall "delta" in capacitance is reduced. I found that, for the amount of divergence that I was experiencing, paralleling C30/C66 with a 6 pf Silver Mica capacitor brought the dial into close enough calibration for my purposes. (There is a bit of divergence at around 3.6 MHz, but there's nothing I can do about that).


Receive Frequency shifts with changes in RF gain.

This seems to be a common problem with the HR-10 series receiver, and dynamic variation of the "125" plate-voltage line (i.e. the junction of R44, R43, and C56 in the schematic) seems to be the source of the problem. This voltage is generated by dropping the DC from the cathode of the rectifier through a series 1500 ohm, 10 watt resistor. Thus, because any change in RF gain changes plate current, plate voltage will also change because the the voltage drop through the 1500 ohm resistor has changed.

Unfortunately, as plate voltage varies, so does the frequency of the oscillator(s).

One way to fix the frequency shifting is to stabilize (regulate) the plate voltage. I added a series-string of four 5 watt Zener Diodes from the R44, R43, and C56 junction to ground (there's also a series 10-ohm resistor so that I can measure current, and thus power-dissipation, through the zeners). These diodes consist of three 33V, 5 watt diodes and one 18V diode, for a total voltage of 117 volts (prior to adding the zeners this node measured 144 VDC instead of the spec'd 125 volts, so there's headroom). Power dissipation in the 33V diodes measured to be about 1.2 watts apiece, so there's plenty of margin, dissipation-wise.

These diodes are shown at the top of the schematic below.

(Click on schematic to enlarge)

Note: Reference Designators in the schematic reference the original Heathkit parts. Parts without reference designators are new parts.


AGC (AVC) for SSB and CW

The HR-10B suffers from the standard problem with receivers designed pre-SSB: the AGC is worthless for SSB. Instead the user is advised to turn off the AVC, set the AF Gain to 3 o'clock (i.e. HIGH!), and then adjust the RF gain for an appropriate signal level.

In other words, there is no AGC for SSB or CW!

Before getting further into modifications, let's first take a step back and try to understand why this is...

Vintage receivers (prior to the days of product-detectors) typically used their diode-detector to detect both AM as well as SSB/CW detection. In SSB/CW mode this detector is driven by the output of a basic heterodyne mixer in which this output contains the BFO signal that it is driven with, as well as the beat products. These beat products form an envelope on the output waveform which is detected by the diode-detector. There are several problems with this method of demodulation for SSB and CW.

First, because the SSB or CW signal is demodulated with an envelope detector, the BFO signal must be quite a bit larger than the IF signal if there is to be minimal distortion on either CW or SSB. You can get an idea of why this is so by looking at the image below and comparing the envelopes of the two waveforms (Es = Eo and Es = 0.5Eo).

(Click on image to enlarge)

(Terman, F. E. Radio Engineers' Handbook, First Ed., McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1943, Page 567)

Imagine that Es is the IF signal representing a CW signal and Eo is the oscillator. If the amplitude of Es is significantly less than Eo, then the envelope on the resultant mixed waveform looks close to a sine-wave (look at the envelope of the Es = 0.5 Eo signal). And because this envelope is detected with the diode-detector, it will sound fairly undistorted.

But as the amplitude of Es approaches that of Eo, the envelope becomes much more distorted (look at the envelope of the Es = Eo signal), and thus the resultant detected output will be full of harmonics and sound grossly distorted.

So the IF signal must always be appreciably less than the BFO signal. But...this introduces another problem. Because AVC is also derived from the signal at the output of this mixer (which contains the BFO signal if its on), if the BFO is on this BFO component at the output of the mixer will swamp the AVC circuit and thus severely attenuate the receiver.

For this reason the operator manuals for older receivers state that, when receiving CW (or SSB) signals, the AVC should be turned OFF, the Audio Gain turned UP, and the RF Gain manually adjusted to provide a comfortable signal level. Not very convenient nor friendly to your ears when a very strong signal suddenly pops up nearby, and an excellent reason for adding a product detector and upgrading the AVC circuitry.

So...I decided to update the AGC circuit and at the same time add a product detector in lieu of the original CW detection scheme.

First thing I did was to replace V5, a triple-diode tube (6BJ7) with three 1N4148 diodes. (I had some DC voltage on the AVC line even with no input signal that I attributed to "leakage" in the 6BJ7 tube. Replacing the tube with diodes fixed this problem, and, of course, also lowered power dissipation).

For the AGC circuit I added a 1N4148 diode to change the AGC voltage-doubler configuration from a "Villard" circuit to a "Greinacher" circuit, which has better ripple characteristics. I increased the AGC decay time by paralleling a new 0.22 uF cap with the existing 0.05 uF cap (C29) and moving the location of the 1M resistor (R26) to increase the decay resistance from the original 2.2M ohms to 3.2M ohms.

With the 1M ohm resistor that had controlled the charge-rate moved, I replaced its function with a much smaller 9.1K ohm resistor (this value doesn't need to be exact -- in fact, you can probably get away with just using a jumper in lieu of this resistor).

I used an NE602 for the product detector -- my original goal being to use its on-chip oscillator for the BFO. Unfortunately, when I tried this (using the "stock" HR-10B BFO components) I found that the BFO frequency would "pull" with incoming signal strength (e.g. as RF Gain or AVC varied). I couldn't discover why this was happening, so I worked around it by replacing the on-chip oscillator function with a simple external oscillator using an MPF102 FET, and it worked much better.

If the BFO is on when in AM mode, you can hear it heterdyning with the carrier of the incoming signal, so it's necessary to turn the BFO off when receiving AM signals. To disable the oscillator the low-end of the oscillator tank circuit, T5, is removed from ground using a 2N7000 transistor. To turn the BFO on, this transistor must first be turned on to short pin 1 of T5 to ground.

While experimenting I ended up with quite a bit of attenuation at the input of the NE602 (the capacitive divider). I'm not sure if this much attenuation is needed; I added it because, during my testing I was experiencing some distortion issues and this seemed to help. However, I was making a number of changes around this time, and I could easily have over-compensated. Don't take these values as being the final word -- experiment!

The demodulated output from the NE602 drives two separate paths -- the audio path and the AGC path. I wanted to decouple the audio-path gain from the AGC-path gain (this is an audio-derived AGC circuit) just in case I needed different gains for the two paths. The op-amp inputs are fed via simple low-pass filters (to remove any residual RF from the output of the NE602). Gain of the audio path is about 37 dB, while gain of the AGC path is about 39 dB. This isn't much of a difference, and one could probably use the same op-amp to drive both paths.

The TL082 op-amp has a max power-supply rating of 35 volts (when powered with a single supply). I powered it with 30 volts to ensure that I'd have plenty of headroom when experimenting with gains -- the op-amps are biased at 15 volts, which give them about a +/- 12 volt swing (the TL082 output limits when within (roughly) 2-3 volts of either power-supply rail).

AGC gain is set to give me the same S-meter reading (roughly) when in either AM or SSB mode (BFO Off or On).

Audio gain is set to give the same audio ouput at the speaker (very roughly) when in either AM or SSB mode.

A relay is used to select between AM (no BFO) and SSB (BFO) modes. In AM mode, the HR-10B demodulation and AGC circuitry is the same as the "stock" receiver (with the exception of the changes to the voltage-doubler and RC time-constants described above). A 48V coil for the relay is used to minimize current drain (and thus power dissipation) -- it only draws 4 mA when on.

No changes were made to the Noise Limiter (ANL).

Here's a photo showing where and how I mounted the op-amps and the NE602. You can also see the string of zener diodes I added for oscillator stability near the top of the photo.


Note: Reference Designators in the schematic reference the original Heathkit parts. Parts without reference designators are new parts. And for many of these parts the value isn't critical -- I usually just pulled parts out of the junkbox that were in the ballpark of what I wanted.


Broad Selectivity

The HR-10B receiver has a two crystal crystal- lattice filter spec'd at 3 KHz down at 6 dB at an IF frequency of 1681 KHz.

Although 3 KHz might seem narrow, I've found that the skirts of the filter (on my receiver) are not very steep at all. This gentle roll-off of the filter skirts results in audio that is fairly broad, and, in fact, for AM reception I find that the receiver actually sounds pretty good.

I did find an article in Electric Radio regarding modification of the HR-10B crystal filter (as well as crystal filters in other receivers -- refer to the Electric Radio articles in the "Resource" section below). I decided not to attempt these mods at this time.


Deaf on 15 and 10 Meters

Lack of sensitivity on the high bands is a common complaint for this receiver, and mine is no different. I've poked around at this, and it looks like it's caused by a couple of things.

1. The RF Preamp (V1 and associated circuitry) has appreciably lower gain on 15 and 10 meters.

2. On 15 and 10 meters the HF Oscillator, rather than beating the incoming signal with the fundamental of the oscillator to get the IF frequency, instead beats the incoming signal with the second harmonic of the oscillator frequency. The amplitude of the second harmonic will always be less than that of the fundamental frequency, and, depending upon how the second harmonic is generated, the second harmonic might be significantly lower in amplitude.

Signal level at the output of the mixer is a function of the level of the input oscillator, so a lower-level oscillator signal will result in a lower-level output (and this can be exasperated if there's a square-law (or higher!) function in the mixing process.

I haven't yet looked into improving the performance on 15 and 10, given that there's sure to be a stability issue, too, given that we're using the second harmonic for the conversion. In other words, jitter or drift at the fundamental frequency means twice the jitter or drift at the second harmonic, and thus twice the degradation in stability!


Other Notes:

1. There's an optional Crystal Oscillator (HRA-10-1) which can be plugged in. This is a useful option!

2. Others have mentioned that alignment of the RF/Oscillator section can change when the bottom steel plate is reinstalled after completion of the alignment procedure. It has been recommend that holes be drilled in the bottom plate so that the receiver can be aligned with the plate in-place. I've not yet done this.


Resources:

Electric Radio Magazine Articles:

• "Resurrection of a Heath HR-10B Receiver," Paschall, Issue 210, Nov. '06
• "The Heathkit HR-10 Receiver," Hanlon, Issue 232, Sept. '08
• "Heathkit HR-10 Receiver Update," Stock, Issue 234, Nov. '08
• "Modifying Heathkit Crystal Filters," Stock, Issue 231, Aug. '08

Search Heath listserve archives here.

HR-10B Schematic here.

HR-10B Modifications here.


Standard Caveats

There might be mistakes. I cannot guarantee that everything is accurate. Use at your own risk!

The HR-10B has high voltages -- use caution whenever working on it!