They say a picture is worth 1000 words, well here are 4 pictures so that has to worth a novel or 2. Anyway no opus this post, just the meat of it. I built 2 xtals filters, in each case i grabbed 8 random xtals out of the parts bins, no matching. The xtals are ebay specials 100 for $1 and are probably rubbish that did not meet specification and was taken out of the rubbish bins at the factory. So the highest quality man cannot buy in other words.
The difference between the 2 filters comes in the matching, filter one is matched with the traditional ferrite inductor, though i used binoculars as i prefer winding those for transformers over toriods and the 2nd filter was matched using low pass filters. The filter plots speak for themselves, the low pass filter matched has a better shape but -15db less attenuation in the stop band than the ferrite matched filter. And the losses were about the same -7db. -3db is 2200hz. So with some matching the crystals i should be able to improve the flatness in the passband and probably remove some losses.
But other than that, if you can live with -50db of opposite sideband suppression, the grabbing random xtals out of the box and matching with low pass filters might actually be a rather simple and crude way of IF filtering. For now, i think i will stick to winding the transformers, or buying 4:1 transformers off Mouser.
