analogham-radioradioreceivervacuum-tube
I've designed this radio circuit, it's made to work on the 80m and maybe 40m band.
Regen is controlled using a pot in the tickler coil. Tube is ECF82, coil is air cored on a 30mm former. Will it be able to receive LSB and CW, or just AM? Can you recommend any good literature on the topic of regen receivers?
No, you can't listen and talk at the same time. Ham radio is not like using a telephone. The input of the receiver can't handle the power output of the transmitter.
If you have separate receiver and transmitter units, you'll need separate antennas, or some means of switching one antenna between the two units. If you have a transceiver, this mechanism is already built into the equipment.
"Some means of switching" could be as simple as a manually-operated switch or relay, but more commonly, you have a control signal from the transmitter that's driven by the PTT (push-to-talk) button that operates a relay automatically.
Regenerative receiver uses deliberate positive feedback (called "regeneration") to increase the gain of the RF amplifier. A useful side-effect is to sharpen the tuning (useful search term : Q multiplier).
This regeneration is adjustable; the art of tuning a regenerative receiver for a weak station is to get the positive feedback as high as possible without allowing oscillation to start.
As the BBC Handbook (1928) says...
The super-regen, on the other hand, allows the oscillation to start, but "quenches" it at a frequency above the desired channel bandwidth (above the 5kHz or so audio bandwidth of an AM radio.)
Received RF energy helps the oscillation to start earlier, and build up faster to a high amplitude before the quenching happens, so the effect is to give a super-regenerative receiver enormously high gain and sensitivity.
However it cannot distinguish between tiny signals on the tuned frequency or larger ones slightly off station, so this sensitivity comes at some cost in interference rejection.
Best Answer
I certainly don't have enough experience with radio circuits to say much here, but one problem sticks out to me immediately: your potentiometer R2 doesn't have its third terminal connected. Since turning a pot (or sliding, if it's a slide pot) can cause the wiper to bounce up off the track, it's usually recommended to connect the "unused" terminal to the wiper to prevent internal arcing when turning it, especially with an inductor on the other side of it.