Baluncore said:
For the broadcast band, the antenna is not resonant and so has a very poor Q.
For receive the antenna must work over the whole band without tuning.
The Q of the tank is therefore critical to selectivity.
The two stages, antenna and tank, must not be tightly coupled, or they will share low Q.
That is why there is a very small coupling cap between stages.
Your OP title was "Receiver Circuit Question -- What role does this antenna capacitor play".
May I try again to reprase and extract your main point?
If we have a general receiver and we are interested in improving it, then
naively we can always decomope is in "antenna" and "rest part" including
eg tuned LC-tank, demodulator, filter etc:
And of course one important part of the tuning procedure is to
adapt the right receiving properties on our purposes. And these mathematically
are rougly characterized by Q, so we want modify the receiver circuit
by modifying the reveriver's Q, right?
Naively, as in case #19, we have different Q's (which allow
in reasonable sense this "bandwidth interpretation"): the Q_A of the antenna,
the Q_T of the total receiver system (ie with antenna),
the Q_r of the "rest part" (receiver without the antenna), but
we can also of course as I said associate a Q to internal submodules
of the rest part, ie to the LC-tank like in #19.
So do I understand it correctly that theoretically it is
"recommendable" to work with the Q_T of the total receiver system, but
in practice in order to adapt the right bandwidth of the receiver
the considerations on antenna can be neglected, so instead of working
with Q_T, one tends to working with Q_r of the "rest system" simply
"ignoring" the antenna part completely?
So the question is about effort and benefit: how much better our
receiver system with become, if we try to adapt our Q_T with respect
the total system or if it already suffice to with with Q_r for our purposes,
assuming that in practice it's easier to work with rest system's Q_r.
In other words the question is how much better the receiver system would
become if we would try to improve Q_T, instead of Q_r. If the proper improvement
is low, then it suffice to work with Q_r.
Is this what you essentially wanted to say in #45? So that the considerations
on antenna's Q are formally reasonble, but in practice dispensable (probably just because it usually requires some additional effort, if we as you said additionally try to adapt the Q of the antenna and the rest circuit together ), so it suffice to focus on the Q of the rest part of the receiver ingnoring the antenna?
Did I interpret you correctly?