Rick ) writes:
Well, I am beginning to have some doubts about the likelihood of finding
an excellent-quality Hammarlund HQ-180 at a price I can afford.

Certainly I am going to keep looking, but meanwhile I guess I need to come
up with a few alternatives that I can "settle" for if, as seems likely,
the HQ-180's have priced themselves out of my reach.

I need something that is all tubes, and works well on SSB. I plan to use
it mostly on CW but I need decent SSB performance. AM is relatively less
important (it should work on AM but doesn't need to be a spectacular
performer).

It does need to be general coverage 500 KHz to 30 MHz.

R390's and 51J4's would be good (but of course, more expensive than the
HQ-180) but none comes with a product detector and so performance on SSB
is likely to be marginal at best, right?

This is mostly a myth. I had an SP-600 for years, and never had problems
receiving SSB. You just turn down the RF gain, turn up the audio gain
to compensate, turn on the BFO and tune away. The issues of using
such receivers for SSB date from the very early days, when people didn't
understand how to do it, and so they were disappointed. Obviously, some
cheap receivers did have problems, because even with the gain turned
way down, the BFO wasn't strong enough. But that's not likely the case
for the better receivers.

The limitations would be in whether the dial allows for fine enough
tuning (which will likely be fine in those receivers) or lack of selectivity
(which won't be a factor with those receivers, and doesn't actually affect
SSB reception, just affects how much other clutter you do receive).

Having a product detector did make it easier to tune in SSB signals, making
the process less cumbersome.

Michael VE2BVW