Lol, for me it means I'm waiting for a picture of the hardware

Just a couple of things I was wondering about since you said it was a super-het,
is where you got IF transformers?... Is this the sort of thing you can buy, or just salvage from some other radio?
Also the tuning gang.. wondered what you used there.

ps.. it uses silicon, it's far from perfect but if you haven't yet done the audio amp it's not too late to save it

 

The tuned tanks for the amplifiers are made from toroids I bought from Amidon. The capacitors in those tanks are made up of a fixed capacitor in parallel with a small tuning capacitor. My own criticism is that the rf amplifier has a gain of 20 which is probably too much and is creating a noise problem. The mixer has a gain of 10.5 and the IF strip has a gain of 1500 when not attenuated. As it is I have to attenuate it sharply in order not to overdrive the last amplifier. The antenna was just a long enamel coated wire hung outside between my house and my shed. I say 'was' because it broke. It wasn't much good anyway.

 

Here's a link:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/42069670@N03/13915169296/in/photostream/

I have looked at the schematic of your receiver. The IF amplifier does have a lot of gain. There is one way that you can control the gain of the If stage. The 2n3904's have a 1k resistor from the emitter to ground that has a bypass capacitor in parallel with it. If you keep the total resistance 1k, but split the resistor into two values like 820Ω an 180Ω and only bypass the 820Ω the gain of the stage will reduce. Or you can add some filtering to the detector after you take the audio out and feed it back to the base of each IF amplifier transistor and have automatic volume control. (AVC) If the diode detector is set up as having + out of the detector, change it to - and you will have - AVC voltage.

 

I have looked at the schematic of your receiver. The IF amplifier does have a lot of gain. There is one way that you can control the gain of the If stage. The 2n3904's have a 1k resistor from the emitter to ground that has a bypass capacitor in parallel with it. If you keep the total resistance 1k, but split the resistor into two values like 820Ω an 180Ω and only bypass the 820Ω the gain of the stage will reduce. Or you can add some filtering to the detector after you take the audio out and feed it back to the base of each IF amplifier transistor and have automatic volume control. (AVC) If the diode detector is set up as having + out of the detector, change it to - and you will have - AVC voltage.

That is all very sound advice. I've done that in the past. But this time I wanted a strong IF, my thinking being the IF is the place where a radio can be made sensitive without picking up a lot of noise. I'll play around with it some more. Right now I'm going to reconstruct the rf amplifier into a common base amplifier like it was originally, with a gain of about one volt per volt. The transistor there is a high frequency low noise type and should be good for 30 MHz. Here's a picture of the radio built in two modules:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/42069670@N03/13951819282/

Here's a medium shot:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/42069670@N03/13974944773/

 

That is all very sound advice. I've done that in the past. But this time I wanted a strong IF, my thinking being the IF is the place where a radio can be made sensitive without picking up a lot of noise. I'll play around with it some more. Right now I'm going to reconstruct the rf amplifier into a common base amplifier like it was originally, with a gain of about one volt per volt. The transistor there is a high frequency low noise type and should be good for 30 MHz. Here's a picture of the radio built in two modules:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/42069670@N03/13951819282/

Here's a medium shot:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/42069670@N03/13974944773/

Rebuilding the RF amplifier may be a good plan, as the real use of the RF amplifier is for image rejection for the receiver. All the gain should be in the
IF amplifier anyway.

 

Rebuilding the RF amplifier may be a good plan, as the real use of the RF amplifier is for image rejection for the receiver. All the gain should be in the
IF amplifier anyway.

In a post above somewhere someone said something to the effect that putting an rf amplifier with just a high resistance looking at the low impedance antenna is more of a voltage detector than a radio front end. Or did I dream this?

At any rate, if this is so it is so. But what is a receiver other than a voltage detector? I realize it has to do with a properly terminated line so as to minimize the SWR. But when the method of just using a high impedance at the front end works why not use it? It's simple.

On edit (funny the opportunity to do that is still here this morning) I restored the rf amp to its original design -- a common base with a resistor at the collector and a theoretical 52 ohms input resistance. The radio is now performing as it should. It's finished. Now I'll experiment with antennas.

I read your post about the ferrite loop antenna. That's what I went with, too. I put it on top of the swamp cooler on my roof but I have no tuning capacitor in parallel with it. I'm going to set up a new one in my room, use a ground and a capacitor and see what happens.