I spent the 1970's working in Southern California for McDonnell Douglas located in Long Beach.
During that time there was a Re-born Christian religious movement in California, called "I Found It ". You only need to look at all of the bumper stickers in the parking lot that read I Found It, to see the impact of the movement.
Our Jewish brothers always ahead of the curve provided a simple competing bumper sticker with a Star of David and the words "We Never Lost It"!
We are not veering off on a religious theme this posting but those words We Never Lost It embody the old time spirit of our wonderful hobby. But that only comes when the hobby is more than contesting or operating. Too many of our BTE's never found it and never will!
Today I want to share with you another rig I built. Several years ago, when there was a prolific output of rigs from the N6QW Laboratories, I built this jewel.
Of note this case was from a repurposed rig that had a 20X4 LCD hole cut in the middle of the panel. So how do you fit a rather nice Color TFT into a panel that has a gaping hole right in the middle?
The first thing was to create a picture frame around the gaping hole to focus your attention right in the middle. The next piece was the paint scheme, a tip from a marketing class in Grad school. Want to sell a lot of cereal -- a Black box with yellow printing! (The product was called Screaming Yellow Zonkers.)
But the neat part was the yellow panel is recessed behind the black picture frame. At one time I thought of adding lights to illuminate that yellow panel. But space behind the panel was a problem.
Then comes the color of the display. Yes, it is a two range VFO with VFO memory. I think what initially was a pig with lipstick, was now indeed a very nice-looking radio.
As a follow on to the prior post, this rig has the Plessey IF Module built in SMD form with the two ADE-1's serving as the Rx/Tx Mixer and the Product Detector/Balanced Modulator all on a circuit board that is wider than an inch and about 4.5 inches long.
The packaged Crystal Filter is mounted off board for a reason. This rig is also a test bed where I have cycled about 5 or 6 filters (including HB) through this radio and all it takes is unsolder the matching transformers and bolt down the filter.
A nice open layout.
So while my building days may be over, I haven't lost the lessons of the past as this is the value of actually building stuff.
As we mentioned on this blog the demise of homebrew was noted in the late 1950's as more commercial hardware became available.
There is a ham in Oregon with a two letter 2 call that always speaks about our need to listen and I want to encourage you the blog readers to take a short period of time to listen to the current conversations on the bands.
Last night while doing the laundry as the washer/dryer is in the garage and next to one of my operating positions I was listening on 40M to a group of hams (all running pricey SDR's) talk about linear amps. It seems the "most wanted" list of amps are all solid-state LDMOS and a low end one at $3700 (only 800 watts) and the Collins of the 2024 is soon to be released legal limit amp by Apache Labs at a mere stripped-down price close to $6000.
That is insane! I worked coast to coast and to Japan running only 60 watts with a homebrew SDR on 40M. I will bet none of the 40M group could fix a problem with their pricey amps as they never found it.
73's
Pete N6QW