If you are looking for a basic FM receiver capable of monitoring the 144-148MHz amateur band, this unit should do the job quite nicely. It’s all built on a PC board measuring just 90 x 74mm and plugs into your PC’s parallel port via a DB25 male-to-female printer cable.

An on-screen display lets you control the receiver and does away with expensive hardware such as meters, digital displays and tuning knobs. You don’t even need to house the device in a case if you don’t want to, although a low-cost plastic case to protect the circuit would probably be the way to go.

Fig.1 shows the on-screen display that’s used to "drive" the VHF Receiver. There’s really not much to it! The top half is dominated by the large digital frequency display and a tuning meter, while between these are three memory preset buttons and a large vertical fine-tuning "knob".

The bottom half of the display carries a Power button, a coarse tuning "knob" and squelch and volume slider controls. You tune the unit in 5kHz, 10kHz or 100kHz steps, either by dragging the tuning "knob" with the mouse or by clicking the Up and Down arrows on either side. Clicking anywhere on the circumference of the knob will also tune the receiver to that spot.