On Thu, 25 Sep 2003 00:31:07 UTC, (N2EY) wrote:

How about,
put a piece of tape over the mike jack. Or even more realisticly,
give up finding a Heathkit 2 prong mike connector.

HAW! That's a good one!

I spent a year looking for that connector. Someone told me that
it's a still in production Amphenol part, or Amphenol sold the
rights to someone, no one knew the part number but that Newark
carried it.

I couldn't figure out what part it was so I asked a vendor at the
Timonium Maryland Hamfest and they had it. It's pricey so I only
got two. Dumb move on my part since I have 5 rigs that need it, an
SB-104A, SB-401, two SB-102's, and an SB-101.

The connector/coax vendor goes to all the mid-Atlantic Hamfests and
is based in Rockville, MD.

None of the rigs are "ready to use". I've been working on my SB-303
collection. The plan is to clean up and restore the radios and
eventually sell them off, keeping one SB-102/SB-303 combination, the
104A, and the CX7A.

Seriously, though, that series is a good candidate for conversion to CW-only,
as you suggest.

Well, I wouldn't actually "modify" the radios. I'm a restorer,
although I'm not a purest. One of my SB-200s has the Harbach soft
key mod in it and I'm getting ready to add the mod to the other.

My rules a 1) keep it looking factory stock, 2) if I modify it,
do it out of sight and reversable. 3) no cutting sheetmetal but an
added bracket or board is acceptable. 4) tack solder electrical
mods.

I'll replace components with close-enough and modern. I put a
radial lead cap in place of an axial in an SB-303. The new cap is
about half the size and has more capacity.

I always operate with it off! Old trick, makes CW much more fun. AF gain way
up, RF gain way down, RF gain used as volume control. Try it - you may like it.


With AGC on, anyhting in the passband makes the gain go up and down. And since
a CW signal is all ups and downs, having the AGC on can make QRM worse!

Ever use a Drake 2B on slow AGC? It takes a LONG time for the gain
to come back. Of course on fast, it's pumping the noise.

After all these years using homebrew rigs whose tunable oscillators are built
around variables from ARC-5 transmitters and BC-221s, I'm spoiled rotten. 6 kHz
per turn of the big, skirted solid Bakelite tuning knob. Silky smooth when you
have a good one. Almost not fit for polite company.

I might have one of those in my basement. Big air cap, like a
transmitter tuning capacitor but with a worm drive?

Unless your junkbox has a pair of thsoe Heath CW filters, the Inrad may be
cheaper! The Heath filters are only 4 pole, with 5:1 shape factor.

I have lots of Heathkit filters. Most are in radios. I have one
SB-303 with dual cascaded 2.1 filters in it. There is an audible
difference in how fast signals vanish as you tune past them. Never
thought to try that with CW filters.

Has to be in the LMO. Maybe they use the sideband-offset thingie.

I found one write up for the HW-101. That has a exposed VFO. The
SB LMO is hard to remove from the radio and is built in layers.
Also, Heath did not publish the internal details.

Looked in a couple radios. Seems that the SB-10x and the SB-30x had
different LMO's. The SB-30x LMO had a RTTY board on it.

Here's another trick for the scrounger:

Get both a Tempo One and an HW-100 or 101. Remove the often-balky Heath VFO and
install the VFO from the Tempo. That Tempo (actually Yaesu) VFO is about the
best thing in the rig, and it tunes the right range (5-5.5 MHz). And it is all
set up for RIT!

It might tune in the wrong direction. .... Or is that just the
electrical direction?


Classic Exchange is this weekend.

The Type 7 is only about 12 years old. Maybe I'll have to drag the Type 6 out
of storage...

That's a conundrum. If you build a new design tube radio, why
is that not a classic? Why is my 1970ish solid state, digital
readout CX7A or SB-104A more a classic?

you might be interested in

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/amateur-repairs

About 1,000 of us hang out there and discuss fixing radios.




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