As a follow on to yesterdays post, this is hamfest and flea market season. Don't pass up a good deal on one of those old boat anchors for with a bit of "N6QW Magic" you can have a really neat new rig for just pennies.
The colorful pictorial shows how to construct a VFO/PTO to replace the LO scheme in those old boat anchors. This bit of magic selects the proper range and frequency for injection into the boat anchor mixer stages (Buttons 1-5). But the slick stuff, in addition to the encoder knob, Buttons 8 and 0 let you up down tune the radio from the keypad and Buttons * and # let you transmit 10kHz up or 10 kHz down for those DX split operations. You can also select two large step tuning ranges for a fast QSY.
Detailed documentation is available at https://www.n6qw.com. While this was built for a Ten Tec Triton II -- it would easily work with the Hallicrafters SR-160, The SWAN 240, National NCX-3 and the KW Atlanta 2000.
I bought a rather pristine NCX-3 for $70 and it is a candidate for a makeover. You get full band coverage and think about FT-8 on 20M with a very stable NCX-3.
Having fun with the electrons. TYBNYG.
73's
Pete N6QW