By Jack Roland, CBRE, AMD and CBNT
KLove /Air 1 EMF Colorado Engineering.
My friend Jeremy, N6JER, (and EMF Western Region Manager Engineer) was able to get his 5BTV vertical in the air and ON THE AIR here in March. He lives in an area that has a lot of clay and hard soil, so driving the mounting pipe into the ground was just nearly impossible, until the southern California area received a lot of rain in the latter part of February early March. So now, N6JER is on the air from SoCal on HF!
5BTV Vertical at N6JER
We have regularly been talking on 40 meters later in the evening. Great signals quite frequently from SoCal to Denver have made it a lot of fun. Let me know if you are interested in joining us one night, and I will text you when we are on.
As I wrote last month, the Vintage Voltage show was a lot of fun and sure enough, I found another restoration project to work on. I picked up a Zenith G-503 “Companion” radio from around 1953 as far as I can tell. The radio is AM band only, and was built to be a “companion” to the Transoceanic series G500 shortwave tube receivers. It sold for around 40 dollars or so back then. I found it for 10 dollars at the show. Beautiful AM only radio. 5 tubes in this radio, a 1S5, 3V4, 2 1U4’s, and the converter 1L6 tube. All my tubes in this radio tested good and strong, except for one of the 1U4’s. I will be replacing that one, and all the of old wax-paper caps, plus several resistors that were burnt along with some wiring when what looks like was a burn up of the original silicon rectifier. It has been replaced by a glass diode and a 5 watt 150 resistor for the supply voltage input. I need to make sure that those values are going to be correct for the tube filament supply and other voltages needed in the radio.
The unrestored radio, just dirty and needs some cleaning and electronic work
Underneath the chassis
A closeup of the mid chassis, showing the melted wiring and where the old selenium rectifier was originally positioned
The VERY interesting pulley system for the dial cord going into the “flip up” dial face.
The reason for this innovative system came about because of the tendency to leave the radio on, thereby running down the batteries, which was REALLY expensive back then. Design engineers of the day had used several different ideas to remind people to turn the radios off when done listening. When the dial face is up and forward, rig on. In the down position, radio off. Worked really well and as you can see was quite intricate with the system of pulleys. VERY cool!
The Project laid out, ready to go
I will be keeping you up to date on how this project goes. “Stay Tuned”
AND, be sure to catch the latest episodes of Bob Heils “Hamnation” every week on TWIT.TV. You will catch all kinds of interesting features and ham talk every week, just put in “Hamnation” in Google and it will take you right there. You can watch the show live on Wednesday nights or catch back episodes off the website or download for later playback.
Bob Heil, K9EID, Gordon West, WB6NOA,
George, W5JDX, and Joe Walsh, WB6ACU
This month, I had to show these QSL’s!
KH6BB, the Battleship Missouri ARC at Pearl Harbor, worked 8/26/13
NJ2BB, Battlehip New Jersey ARC, worked 10/23/01
NI6BB, Battleship Iowa ARC, worked 2/22/14
I just received the Iowa QSL card right before this writing! I especially love special event stations on the air! The next “officially scheduled time” to work these ships other than the club stations being on the air will be the “Museum Ships Weekend 2014”, to be held 0000Z June 7 thru 2359Z June 8th. I will definitely be trying to add BB64, The U.S.S. Wisconsin (N4WIS) to my QSL collection, completing my collection of Iowa Class BB QSL cards! Look up the club websites to see when they might be operating! I am also adding to my collection of Aircraft Carriers, Destroyers, Submarines and the like as often as possible. There is a big list of Museum Ships on the air at www.N4WIS.org/Museum_ships.html.
From EMF VP of Engineering Sam, KG6BZU:
I ran across these today… some require a bit of thinking, but are fun!
1. Entropy isn’t what it used to be.
2. Q. How can you tell the difference between a chemist and a plumber?
A. Ask them to pronounce “unionized”
3. Q. Why do engineers confuse Halloween and Christmas?
A. Because Oct 31 = Dec 25
4. Helium walks into a restaurant and orders a beer. The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve noble gases here.” He doesn’t react.
5. A Higgs Boson walks into a church and the priest says, “We don’t allow Higgs Bosons in here.” The Higgs Boson replies, “But without me, how could you have mass?”
6. The programmer’s wife tells him, “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.” The programmer comes home with 12 loaves of bread.
7. There’s a band called 1023MB. They haven’t had any gigs yet.
🙂
Sam
How about this “QUEEN” of an audio processor
Look carefully!
Don’t forget the SBE IRLP (and Echolink) Hamnet, the first Saturday of the month. AND the EMF Hamnet now is the same manner on every Monday evening at 7pm Mountain time for radio discussions, both broadcast engineering and Amateur radio. Details on how to join are at http://www.qsl.net/ke0vh/sbehamnet. I hope you will be able to join us and share your engineering and ham exploits!
73’, God be with you, & see you next time! KEØVH