Aaron's site is interesting. I have plenty to learn before I tackle a PLL design. I'm trying to get practical knowledge of toroids for now. 30 years ago I built a good 80 & 40 meter ssb receiver.
I'm starting the hobby again. Just starting to collect parts.
I want to build a receiver again.
The site with the old books won't help you with what you're doing. It would only distract you, or not.
Great! Cool even! I just built a receiver again and I put some recordings up but it really doesn't do it justice. In other words, I absolutely love this one. It does the job. I got some help with it right here. There are a few guys that know something like Mikebits and some others, but watch out, they will take shots at you in the process.
The things I did with this receiver were just careful, careful, careful design. I biased everything class A and if I saw any loading I buffered the the stages,
At any rate I got to cover my butt because they will hurrel the insults, but I can give you some good advice. I've done my share of building and I am licensed ham 36 years.
The receiver's doing a bang up job. Considering skip and other propagational phenomena, I'm hearing almost all ends of all conversations or if you are a ham, the QSO's.
Really I have had a great deal of difficulty doing the recordings. I get some kind of white noise that just does not exist in real life, but this one was recorded even before I had finished the radio:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/l2ywknexcnn/80MetersB.wma
Anyway it is a communications sweetheart. I put 1st IF & 2nd IF gain control on it and a 6 position preselector. I got a two position band pass selection on the Xtal filter. It's a home brew filter. Nothing fancy on the transistors. Just a hand full of 3904's and a couple of 2N5486 JFETs. Audioguru showed me a great audio chip which I'm using...TDA2822 for speaker drive. And I got a couple of 741s, one goes in the AGC.
At first I was just gonna build a receiver, but the dern thing turned out so good I need to get me a transmitter going again.
As far as the toroids, that's about all I use. I built a tranceiver back a while ago and since lost it in moving, but one of my very first QSOs was to the Cayman Is. and the guy gave me a 5,9 signal report.
What I suggest is that you go to Amidon and get the pamphlet. It is free. They give the AL values for all their cores and the frequency response and anything else you need to know. OK, they call it "The Flyer". It's right here:**broken link removed**
I'm kinda of an old hand with the toroids, so if you need any help don't hesitate to ask. In HF I use allot of Amidon FT-37-43's in the tank circuits and transformers. For oscillators and filters I usually use the number 2 & number 6 mix such as T-37-02 or T-80-06 where (T) is toroid and (80) would be the size parameter for .8 inches diamter and (6) is the powdered iron mix. The designator (FT) means ferrite toroid.
I can show you some tricks for making cheap crystal filters with just two off the shelf crystals and a specially wound transformer to achieve a very narrow band pass < 5KHz. You can stack them too, to make nice binocular core transformers for rf power amps.