"will not sag"

That means it likely won't give you any more, but it won't drop down below what the amp is rated to do in a longish keydown, either.  


Good deal, then.



KE3WD

Put a small SW receiver with BFO on the night table, use earpiece so as not to bother the XYL if that is a factor, and practice lying there at night copying CW in your head while relaxed.  Use the W1AW code practice broadcasts at 10PM also.  

This only works if you practice it often for awhile, but it will work, just like with piano lessons.  


KE3WD

The lower drive rating for audio amps is likely to guarantee that the amp is not driven into clipping, which would yield an inflated power reading but tells us nothing about the audio amp's ability to reproduce the input with fidelity.  

30% would be about right to preclude that condition.  Give or take.  


KE3WD

Sounds like dirty switches and controls, you should spray them out with a good contact spraylube like DEOXIT before doing anything else.  Be sure to operate each one, power off, about 10 times or so full travel, slowly, before the spray cleaner evaporates leaving just the lube.  

 
The hot glue method is faster, find the highest temperature hot glue rods you can, though.  This can be done with the coil in situ with a little thought.  Works fine for me.  

Don't try to remove the old plastic that is stuck to the coil.  Okay to pull out any that is very loose or lying on the chassis, though, of course.  


KE3WD

Oh yeah, forgot this part -- locate the DC power connect(s) to the VFO circuit and place good Digital Multimeter on them, then operate.  Look for variations in the voltage that change with the frequency shifting, you'll likely find them, trace backwards from that point.  


KE3WD

I'd check out the power regulation very carefully here, not the VFO.  

First suspect is always solder connections and possibly controls and switch contacts in need of cleaning and lubing, then comes caps and resistors, tolerances and all that.


KE3WD

Heed K6AER's good advice.  

!

>>What I thought was humorous about that film was it showed all the military operators using old fashioned pump hand keys to send traffic. At that rate, they'd still be sending messages....where were the keyers and paddles? Guess they were shooting for "realism," and people still identify the code with J-38s.

WB2WIK/6 <<


Even more humorous than the J-38s is the scene at the "HQ" where there is a straight key a good foot and one half long keying a small Kenwood transceiver.  The key dwarfs the radio.  Hollywood. I'm sure someone visited a ham/key collector and the director or the prop person just had to use that huge key in a scene.


KE3WD

Those rectifiers should work just fine.  

>>I recapped the radio. The mic ply is a 1/4" phono. It has 2 wires on the jack, so I am assume the chassis is a common. Anyone know what the wiring diagram is? Must use a stereo plug.

Look behind the jack and see if it is a Tip, Ring, Sleeve 3-wire connect or a Tip, Sleeve 2-wire connect.  

Some early transceivers may not have PTT.  

If it is TRS and PTT, then the chassis is indeed the common (GND) and either the tip or the ring is the Audio Mic input.  There is no convention as to the use of Tip or Ring, so either might be the PTT or the MIC.  Typically, connecting to the Sleeve will put the radio into XMIT mode, okay to try shorting one then the other, no harm can come because the MIC input can be shorted to GND safely anyway, the rig just won't go into Transmit.  


KE3WD

Nice find.  

Restoration of ANY good gear from that era is a worthy endeavor IMO.  

You will be shocked by the receiver performance in that thing, man.

--And the AM modulation.


Have fun,


KE3WD

Nichrome wire can also be used to make your own shunts, one foot of 18AWG is about 0.4 ohms or a tad higher, use the ohmmeter to make it exact.  Believe it or not, I've coiled the stuff and cast it in small amounts of cement to roll my own shunts and loads.  The original ceramic resistor, I guess.  This won't be noninductive, so don't try to use it for an RF load.

http://www.wiretron.com/nicrdat.html

There's a software calculator on that page that is handy for calculating resistance values of different metals, too.  

I've even made meter shunts from the old blue steel packing straps in a pinch, depends upon the value needed, of course.

Hams should start thinking more about what is inside some of these components rather than off-the-shelf new parts IMO.  The old boys knew.  


KE3WD

>>The first 500 is the most important so thats where I run both when needed.


Why can't more figure that out and act accordingly?



!

What the heck?

"emphasized dash"

Um, "Great Lakes Swing" 'K?


Historically has meaning, too.  

The environment of the maritime ops on the Great Lakes made it hard to catch the dashes through the radio and storm noise, so the bug ops and straight key ops got into the habit of elongating the dashes to reduce resends and make sure they got copied.  


Great Lakes Swing is what it became known as.  


We have a heritage, a proud one.  Let's not lose it.


KE3WD