Hit the shortwave trail with this two-chip receiver.

Although many constructors have cut their teeth on building ZN414 radio circuits, the device, sadly no longer in production, now has a first class replacement in the MK484 a.m. radio chip. The MK484 i.c. is a similarly three-pinned device with a.g.c. (automatic gain control) requiring only a few components to make a high quality tuner with a maximum supply voltage of just 1·8V. But that isn't all! The author was intrigued to see if it performed as well as its predecessor with the popular LM386 audio amplifier i.c. added to make a simple but effective shortwave radio project with loudspeaker output. The results were quite surprising.