Almost every supermarket / drug store / big box place like Tar-Wal-Get carries 'cosmetic pads' in the Health & Beauty Aids section. Look for cotton pads approximately 1.5" square or the round kind (which are thicker) and typically sold in a bag of 300 for about two bucks.

Pick up a bottle of isopropyl alcohol if you can't find yours at home. Total cost should be around three bucks for the combo. Although the pads tend to leave some lint (which can be easily blown or brushed away with a small paint brush) they are very absorbent and a good cleaning tool as they tend to pull crud into the pad and hold it. Go light on the alcohol, be generous in changing the pads often. Disassemble the mic as needed to clean it inside and out.

As for the yellowed plastic bar, squirt a little dishwashing or liquid hand soap into a coffee mug and add warm water. Mix. Let the bar soak in the liquid overnight or longer. If you have a gas range in the kitchen park the cup over the pilot light so it stays warm. Should brighten up the plastic and give you a clean coffee mug...............

Correction: 3400A RMS Voltmeter.

See what I mean?

A couple of years ago I picked up an HP 427A voltmeter (FET "VTVM") on eBay then acquired the matching 5300 True RMS AC voltmeter from an SK. Forty years ago that was one high-dollar pair of bench buddies and they're as clean and good as new.

A few months ago I reconfigured the workbench and made a space for them. First exercise for the 427A was to check a resistor before using it. Tested bad. Tried another. Tested bad. Went through four resistors before I realized they were all bad by about the same amount.

Yeah, I was trying to read Ohms on the Volts scale.

We all have our moments.

I have a hunch your power meter is being optimistic... If there was a mod for this you'd find non-stock finals (and I believe the originals were flat ceramic pill jobbies with cloverleaf tabs so there wasn't room for anything larger) and a beefed up power cable and fuse.

Assuming you really are seeing 170+ watts on high power that would be something like 35-40 amps of draw on your power supply. Is your DC supply that stout? Typically a rig like that will draw < 10 amps at full tilt TX.

Many frequency counters use a 10 MHz clock and can be calibrated against WWV with an SWL receiver in AM mode and a few feet of wire. Pick a time when WWV on 10 MHz is sounding good using the 'few feet of wire' as an antenna. Turn on the freq counter and let it percolate for 30-60 minutes then lay or wrap a turn of the RX wire around the freq counter case. You should hear the counter's clock and WWV beating against each other. If not, and the counter has a 'Clock Out' BNC on the back, try connecting the free end of the RX wire though the smallest value cap you have in your junk box, something like 5pf, or a > 1 meg resistor to the clock port.

Adjust the frequency counter clock to zero beat against WWV. Exactly. If you can't hear the very lowest tones near zero beat, watch the S-Meter on the receiver for wiggle. Chances are you'll see a steady S-Meter needle at exact zero beat, slow wobble +/- a Hz or two.

As for the LSB and USB oscillators in your rig --- If alignment by the book doesn't play like it should, long ago and far away I had a Tempo 2020 that always sounded muddy and bassy on SSB RX. Aligned both oscillators by the book and it still sounded muffled. Best guess is the xtal filters had aged a shade off frequency. Just for the hell of it I tuned the RX to a quiet spot where I had nothing but band noise and peaked both trim caps for best audio balance. Not too bassy, not too tinny, just flat white noise in the midrange.

It worked. RX sounded good, TX reports likewise.

An alternate for those who need something more than 'sounds good' would be to align everything except the SSB offset and connect the freq counter across the speaker. Tune WWV straight up and wait until it cycles over to tone and clock ticks, then adjust the LSB and USB trim caps until you see the same tone freq as AM.

Shorted rectifier or filter cap most likely. Diode check the pass transistors while you're in there.

Should be an easy fix.

FYI: Did some snoopin' on the web regarding the dielectric properties of PTFE / Teflon and found an outfit that makes a fiberglass mesh insulating tape impregnated with PTFE top, bottom and middle.

http://www.cshyde.com/dielectricfabspec.htm

The tape comes in two flavors: Five mils (.005") @ 3.9 kV and 10 mils (.010") @ 5.2 kV.

A typical trash bag is around 1 mil so fold one five or ten times over on itself for an idea of how thick that is.

I know PTFE is a good insulator, but never imagined it's *that* good. And, yeah, the fiberglass part is no slouch either...

I have an original box-stock IC-756 that needed a minor clock tweak every six months or so but seems to have settled into its groove after the first two years and is now tweakless. If you can apply this idea to the IC-746 Pro it's probably the easiest way to check the VFO accuracy.

Let the rig idle in RX for 30 minutes or better. Go into the options menu and turn on the internal 100 kHz marker generator. Tune WWV in AM mode on whichever frequency is Q-5 with minimal QSB, VFO display showing XX.000.00 kHz. Adjust the trim cap accessible through the hole on the lower right side cover with a diddle stick or medium sized jeweler's screwdriver for zero beat. You do not have to remove any covers nor do you want to.

Can't hear the very lowest tones through the speaker? Not a problem. Watch the S-Meter for wiggle. Set Fast AGC if you like, then tune the trim cap for a steady S-Meter needle. You'll find it takes a bit of patience to get it exactly dead on +/- zilch and you may want to wait for WWV to cycle over to carrier & clock ticks only, but it can be done. Normal up the radio after you have it as close as possible. Switching between LSB and USB on WWV should now sound identical.

Take your time and you'll be very close to spot-on for the next few months. You also have an easy way to check it when in doubt. Internal marker on, WWV in AM, VFO straight up on the zeros. Slow or no wiggle on the S-Meter is O'Tay!

Check locally for any outfit that carries aviation surplus parts, does aircraft repair or deals in avionics. American Airlines had a surplus outlet in Tulsa many years ago and something like a wing wiring harness is about as good as it gets in terms of wire quality. Silver Teflon wrapped in nylon braid covered with a clear plastic sheath and designed for conductivity, mechanical strength, abrasion resistance. Solders easily, too.

No voltage rating as each wire in the bundle was marked only with a reference code per the blueprints -but- Teflon has excellent dielectric properties and 1000v should be no problem for the 12 or 14ga stuff I've seen.

Sometimes you can turn on the OM charm and score a short reel for next to nothing.

That was cold.

At least I had the good taste not to mention that my car has leather seats...........

Your XYL appears to be very accomplished and above average in intelligence, but I wonder if she's considered that a modest car with a 100+ horsepower engine can be had for less than the cost of a horse. Singular. I might also observe that a car eats nothing when it isn't being ridden nor leaves anything in the driveway as an organic calling card.

The next time you talk horses, you may want to mention this... Just in passing.  

Since it's an intermittent condition I'd say it's more likely an intermod issue. Overload from an out of band signal with Moxie is also possible, but intermod tends to rely on a combination of signals that can occur at random intervals. It's not the mixing of frequencies that's random, it's the timing.

The designer(s) probably assumed the stock antenna would be used and cost limitations dictated a simplified front end. You may be able to improve the situation with an outboard bandpass filter but that kinda' negates half of the cheap & cheerful concept...

Son of a gun... I haven't used OpenOffice for Windows in a while but did some poking around the web site and it looks like the .PDF export feature is also available in the current version for Windows.

Very Cool.

Sometimes there are differences between a Linux and Windows version of the same software. The GIMP graphics editor used to be freeware on either platform, now the Windows version is pay-to-play while the Linux version remains freeware. Audacity tends to add new features to the Linux version first, Windows later. Good to see the .PDF trick works in both versions of OpenOffice.

As if Adobe could get a better deal from Redmond than they do from their end yoozers right now. Acrobat ain't cheap!

BTW: One nice thing about 'standardizing' on .PDF for schematics and such is the zoom feature. Some of the older scans are a bit rough and when you can't tell if the 10k resistor connects to pin 3 or pin 8 of V6 the zoom comes in handy.

Daddy... What's a V................?

Now I'm wondering why a Proper English Valve is a V on a schematic but we still call 'em toobs... Damned Colonials!

Note To AC5E:

A few years back I stumbled on what I thought was an interesting piece of coaxial trivia... Probably on the Belden site but it could have been elsewhere. Why are 75 and 50 ohms the most common impedances?

It's a compromise for practicality.

Standard OD's are a tad smaller than 1/4 and 1/2 inch as an installation convenience. Carry 1/4" and 1/2" drill bits and you can run RG-59 or RG-8 wherever you can drill a hole, but what about impedance? Low impedance cables are preferred for TX applications as the larger center conductor can can carry more current -but- this thins the dielectric thickness and reduces the voltage capability. Higher impedance cables have lower losses and are preferred for RX applications -but- can't carry as much current if the receiver is really a transceiver.

Note that this was decided before Teflon and high density foam became available. So... The compromise favored 50 and 75 ohm cables then and remains so today.

BTW: It isn't textbook, but RG-62 (92 ohm solid polyethylene dielectric) worked very well in older TV antenna applications, especially at UHF, although the center conductor was a bit thin for some F-connectors. Today a decent RG-6 is the way to go.