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write your own review of the Heathkit HW-7.
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KE7WAV
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Rating: 4/5
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May 11, 2009 16:37
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Oldie But Goodie
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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I inherited an HW-7 and checked out all of the reviews about the radio then fixed it up to use. I have a few pointers to share for those who look at these transceivers.
-Hum If you want to get rid of it good grounding is an absolute must as well moving the power supply as far away from the rig as practical. Do this and bye-bye hum!
-Tuning This rig can hear both sides of the signal start at the top of the band and tune down and use only the side you hit first. If you pass the zero beat you have gone too far!
-Preselector Tune in carefully and take your time, switching out the stock knob for a bigger one can only help. $2 well spent if you ask me. It will really struggle with interference and weak audio without carefully peaking the preselector.
-Answer CQ's or tail-ending a QSO are your best options. You can call CQ but remember to tune up a little to hear the station calling you and then stay put; don't lose your contact by fiddling around. Also if the station is really weak chances are you'll sound even weaker to him; call the stations with a solid signal.
-Have fun, don't get frustrated just relax and have fun.
Finally, I love this rig it is fun to hear your call coming back from a station 1200 miles away and getting an RST of 569, when you are using 3 Watts fed into a homebrew dipole up 11 feet! These rigs are classic and fun, but not the greatest in the world.
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WB0FDJ
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Rating: 3/5
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Dec 20, 2008 12:46
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Simple as can be
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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My cousin was planning on getting his ham ticket and built one of these radios. He brought it to me to put on the air to "check it out". It had some problems: receiver sensitivity was pretty lousy on all but 40 mtrs. (Don't think he ever got that problem reversed) So I hooked it up to my 14AVQ (which had all of about 6 radials!) seriously doubting that the thing would be heard next door. I still remember the shock of having two enjoyable QSO's with hams also in the midwest and reasonable RST's. The basic idea of the radio was OK but it's importance now is more historical: it lead to the much better HW8 and 9. For me it lead to me buying my first new-in-the-box rig, a Ten Tec Argonaut 509.
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N6KYS
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Rating: 0/5
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Mar 3, 2007 17:33
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Terrible receiver section
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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This thing is terrible...deaf receiver, microphonics on the cabinet. The transmitter portion isn't bad, but the receiver design makes it miserable to use. Get an HW-8 or 9 instead!
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WB0KWJ
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Rating: 3/5
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Apr 6, 2005 23:14
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Transmitter Good/Receiver Bad
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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The HW-7 was the second Heathkit I built when I was still a teenage novice class operator in Kansas in the 1970s. All was well except for a bad solder joint on pin 10 of the CA3035 audio amplifier IC. I was unable to trace the problem. The guys at the Heathkit store fixed it in a matter of hours.
The HW-7 looked a lot nicer and more professional than the corresponding Ten-Tec offerings of the time. The competing Ten-Tec unit had an exposed, easily damaged slide rule dial. Electrically, the rigs were not much different from each other.
The HW-7 had a nicely designed, easy-to-use transmitter. The VFO was stable and the dial calibration was surprisingly accurate. The crystal socket was a vestige of the days when novice class operators were still restricted to crystal control.
The receiver was sensitive enough for a rig of its type and time, but also hopelessly prone to microphonics, AC hum, and AM band interference. I was fortunate then not to live near an AM station. Some operators used batteries instead of an AC supply. I used a 10,000 microfarad filter capacitor in parallel with the supply. The selectivity was controlled by passive filtering. Single-signal reception was not possible.
As with any QRP rig, a good antenna was a must. A 1 microvolt input would give a readable signal. It heard both sides of the CW signal. HW-7 operators learned to tune down the band so they would be on the right sideband.
The defects of the HW-7 were obvious then, and it is probably the case that the HW-7 was put on the market before it was fully tested. The dial markings rubbed off in a matter of days from contact with the inside of the dial window. A couple of spacing washers behind the front panel, which should have been in the original design, fixed the problem. The sidetone oscillator sounded as if it was having trouble getting started. Fixing problems was made more difficult by inaccuracies in the schematic.
I never had much difficulty with the precise receiver preselector adjustments because I replaced the tiny stock Heathkit knob with a much larger one. The other receiver defects could be reduced by using a battery and adding an internal high-pass filter to reduce AM band interference. An Army surplus audio filter helped me with the selectivity problem.
Most annoying to me was the insufficient transmitter offset--only about 75 Hz on 40 meters. This was a serious design oversight. The offset was created by transmitter loading, and should have been implemented directly with a switched-in capacitor or varactor diode. An ordinary reverse-biased signal diode or transistor junction probably would have had sufficient capacitance to reliably move the transmitted signal 800 Hz. HW-7 operators working transceivers without receiver incremental tuning (very common at the time) would walk up the band as each operator re-tuned to hear the other. I had a selection of crystals, and could get around the problem by calling CQ on crystal control and tuning around with the receiver.
The rig was pre-WARC and had only 40, 20, and 15 meters. 80 meters could have been added fairly easily because the base frequency of the direct conversion oscillator was already at 3.5 MHz. 80 meters is a difficult band for QRP because of the antenna dimensions involved. 10 meters would not have been too much more difficult to add, and might have been a more credible choice for QRP. Of course, in those days C.W. McCall's song "Convoy" was a hit, and we worried about losing all of 10 meters to CB.
Despite all the limitations, I continued to use the rig even after earning my Extra class license. I still have it and it still works. I eventually worked almost all the states and a little nearby DX with the HW-7 and just a 14-AVQ vertical. A friend attached it to his triband beam on a 50 foot tower and worked a station in Japan on 15 meters--an impressive feat given the 1.5 watts of output on 15.
If the ratings were based on sentiment -- reflecting the time that there were still Heathkit stores and a multiband transceiver kit was a reasonable one-day project for a teenage ham -- the rig would get a "five." Objectively, the "three" rating reflects an average of a "five" for the transmitter and a "two" for the receiver.
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KB3LFC
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Rating: 5/5
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Jul 20, 2004 17:12
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Great old rig
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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While there may be lots of room for modification improvements, I used my old HW-7 "as is" in the late 1980s and early 1990s (when I was KC3YD) to work a lot of DX. I used the gray peth to work a 2XQRP with a JA station several days a week for about two weeks and worked most of Eastern Europe and Russian Oblasts on 40 Meters after the BCB stations would start shutting down.
I bought the old rig from a ham for $10. He was convinced that QRP was "a worthless waste of time." It was the best $10 I ever spent.
Presently, this fine little rig is in a rented storage bin but I plan to dig it out before winter sets in. Right now I'm using an HW-9 and I do have to admit it is a lot easier to usethan the HW-7 and has a little more "soup" power wise. The previous owner added a digital freq display and the WARC band packs, something the HW-7 certainly lacks.
When zero beating a frequency you have to 'tune up" on the signal to go back to the operator. I have had QSO's with the HW-7 by simply calling CQ, by "tail-ending" a QSO, and of course by answering a CQ call. I have even had a few operators tell me that I was "BSing" them about being QRP. They simply couldn't believe my 1.5 watt signal wasn't 50 or 60 watts.
A "final." Don't bother asking me if I'm interested in selling my HW-7 -- I'm not.
Tom Mitchell KB3LFC
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KB2HSH
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Rating: 4/5
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Apr 30, 2004 22:11
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The trendsetter
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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The HW-7 was one of the first rigs that really pushed the commercial QRP "craze" (along with Ten Tec's Powermite). The HW-7 (and HW-8 for that matter) had direct conversion receivers that weren't as good as they could have been. By today's standards they are rather lacking, but for the era, they were rather peppy. Recently, I purchased an HW-7 (from NA4FM...you can see the rig if you type his call into the callsign search) from eBay. It is by far the cleanest and best performing stock HW-7 I have seen. It even beats the HW-8 that I owned back in the late 90's.
On 40, the HW-7 feels right at home. With up to 3 watts transmit power, and a receiver that is decent, this rig almost makes you forget that you're running QRP. (As I write this, the atmospherics are REALLY bad, but once it all quiets down, I have little doubt as to the rig's effectiveness). The key, as explained by the previous owner (and something I NEVER realized when I had my HW-8) was proper grounding. With the HW-7 grounded (via the antenna tuner, and the power supply) it shockingly sounds like a smaller version of my Hammarlund...in double-sideband.
It's not a Ten Tec Argonaut II...but it sure works fine for me.
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K4VXP
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Rating: 4/5
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Apr 13, 2004 15:57
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Very Nice Little Rig
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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I built my HW-7 back in 1972 and find it to be a good QRP rig and lots of fun. The only mod has been to add a SO-239 and a little larger knob for the receiver preselector. I have found the receiver to be sensitive enough but, being direct conversion, not very selective. I don't give it a perfect 5 because of these reasons and the harmonics experienced on recieve. It does a much better job when powered with a battery. I also have a Ten-Tec 505 which has a somewhat better superhetrodyne receiver.
73, Paul
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WB7AWK
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Rating: 4/5
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Jan 31, 2004 06:19
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Great little rig, but NOT for a novice!
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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Believe it or not, this was my first Novice rig. I had gotten my ticket at the age of 13 in fall of 1974 - WN7AWK - and all the hint dropping to my folks at the local ham store (remember those?) didn't result in an NC-300 with DX-60 that I dreamed of. So for Christmas that year, I got a brand new Heathkit HW-7 and spent a very cold January building it. I took my time, trying to limit the screwups a 13 year old tends to make (still had screwups, but got it working).
Finally in late January I had it built and tested (very carefully using a dummyload - don't want those 2 hot watts leaking out now!). I put up a HORRIBLE 40-meter dipole in the trees, and fired up on 40 CW calling CQ. For a WEEK - SOLID. Not ONE REPLY. Amazing how a kid then would come home every day after school, and call CQ for HOURS to no avail. I finally had my first QSO with a local who made a sched with me - 7 miles away, and I got a 339!
In May, at a garage sale with W7UD, I happened upon an S-85, Globe Scout 680, and a box of crystals and goodies - all for $35. Hank bought it for me, and I spent the rest of the weekend doing yard work feverishly trying to earn the money to pay Hank for my new treasure - I put up a 100 foot wire, and used the homebrew tuner in the garage sale goodies to load the Globe Scout, and worked the world at last!!! Some of the very best memories of my life spent that summer...
But after I got my General, I went back to the HW-7 with a good vertical antenna, well matched with good radials, and worked 35 states and 5 DX contacts, all on 15 and 20 meters - in a month. It's microphonic as hell, with a very touchy 'touch' of the preselector to keep it in line and a HORRID (REALLY HORRID) sidetone - but it gets out if you know how to use QRP and have a good antenna. Also, being direct conversion with no crystal, ya really gotta watch which side of your signal you're listening on - it's not single signal. During the 1980s I used it as a VFO to drive a DX-60. Works great for that, as long as you keep it throttled down and don't overdrive the oscillator. I again worked the world with the HW-7, this time as a VFO. I still have that rig - as a testimony to those WEEKS spent (with log books to prove it) calling CQ and hoping some one someday would come back to me! And I doubt I'll ever get rid of it.
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KU4QW
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Rating: 5/5
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Oct 10, 2002 10:50
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Good Old Rig
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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This radio is very good for it's age, It was a real trend maker, no it wasn't the first qrp radio, but QRP Kit in a small package that you could build and use and carry in the field YES! By today's standards this radio doesn't over much and doesn't receive that well, but I give it a 5 for it does well for the years on it, and I don't think you can break them
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W9YO
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Rating: 2/5
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Apr 30, 2002 23:59
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Yes, It can be improved.
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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Yes the HW-7 was a Heathkit. It was one of the first QRP transceivers out there in the late 1970's. Since the radio was direct conversion it was subject to both microphonics and overload from rf strong signals. The dual MOS-FET front end was almost state of the art for its time. I bought mine for about $50 and built the ac supply myself. There was less AC ripple noise using batteries and I made many contacts with just an inverted vee. I suggest looking through the QST archieves for updates. I built a new rf amplifier front-end using a perf-pc board a few ic's, toroids, & some MPF102's. Afterwards the radio's receiver was greatly improved. Actually I finally sold my HW-7 back in 1990. The ham who purchased it was pleased as punch. The transmitter in mine put out about 2.7W on 40M, 2.2W or so on 20M, & a bit over 1.75W on 15M. With a little tweaking & a few updates this can be a mighty fine self-contained QRP tri-band radio. Don't give up! 73, Bill W9YO
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