Emily Wilson

so anyway i've been building this direct conversion receiver for 40m for the past couple months, just a simple affair with a NE602 mixer and an LM386 for audio. got the basic audio chain working fine a few weeks ago but the RF front end has been driving me crazy ever since i added the bandpass filter and preamp stage.
the problem is i get this weird overload thing happening whenever i tune anywhere near the broadcast band bleeding in, even though im on 40m. i thought the BPF was supposed to kill that. i wound the toroid myself, T50-2 cores, tried to get the turns ratio right but honestly i may have miscounted at some point. it actually receives, like it does pull in signals, SSB sounds decent, but every few minutes there's just this low rumble that kinda swamps everything and i'm pretty sure its AM broadcast intermod.
the preamp is just a single 2N3904 common emitter stage with maybe 15dB gain, wonder if that's just way too much gain before the mixer and making the whole thing more sensitive to junk. thinking about pulling it out entirely and going straight into the 602 through the filter. anyone done something similar or had this kind of issue with NE602 based builds?

so ive been going back and forth on this for like three weeks now and i think im just overthinking it but here goes. im trying to put up something decent for 40m at my place, lot is about 80x120 feet so its not tiny but the neighbors are close enough that i have to be a little careful with what i do. right now im running a little vertical that came with my radio package deal and honestly it works but i feel like im leaving a lot on the table.
the question is basically whether to build a half wave dipole and just string it between the house and the big oak tree in the back, or go with a proper quarter wave vertical with some radials. ive read a bunch of stuff saying verticals are better for dx because of the low angle radiation but then other guys are saying a dipole up 35 feet is going to outperform a vertical in most situations. at 40m 35 feet is not that high obviously, only like a third of a wavelength, so im not sure the dipole would have that great a low angle component anyway.
current setup is a ts-590sg into the existing thing. just trying to figure out what makes sense before i spend a weekend building something.

yeah 10m has been absolutely wild, i worked a station in zimbabwe last week running 100w from my dipole and he came back first call. first call. on 10 meters. from my backyard dipole. i almost fell out of my chair.
the solar flux has been holding above 200 on a lot of days which we havent seen since like 2001-2002 era so this is genuinely exciting stuff especially for anyone who got licensed in the last cycle and never really experienced good HF conditions. get on 10 and 12m as much as you can right now because this window wont last forever, cycle peaks dont stick around.
on the yaesu thing i saw the same rumor but nothing concrete yet. there was supposedly something shown at a trade show in japan but i dont read japanese so i cant confirm anything. wouldnt surprise me though, the FT-60 is getting pretty long in the tooth at this point.

I had similar issues a few months back and it turned out to be packet loss on my work connection. Try running a ping test or traceroute to see if you're getting timeouts. Also check if your work IT department changed anything with their firewall rules - mine started blocking some of the UDP traffic which caused all sorts of weird behavior with remote operation.