Thruth revealed about ham radio

Rich Grise wrote in news:ii7a0p$lb$2 @news.eternal-september.org:

4-400A plates are supposed to be cherry red, especially the cheap sheet metal ones you melt holes into. The graphite plated Amperex tubes both 4-400A and 4-1000A are much better. Graphite melts at a much higher temperature that threatens the glass envelope as the intense IR radiates through it. Cooling the glass and plate seals becomes the problem with graphite. Amperex tubes have spent thousands of hours at the point glass melts with little effects....er, ah....as long as the damned cooling fan bearings don't seize up, again. 4-400A was the staple HF power amp in ship-shore phone installations at ATT and a wonderful source of free used tubes to melt if you knew the right person. There was an ATT shore transmitter in a non-descript building beside the bridge to Sullivan's Island in the 1970's. They gave us hams all the equipment when it went dark later on. Two 4-400A parallel output tubes plate modulated by two 4-400A audio power amps on AM, I forget which 2Mhz channel it was on, maybe 2716 Khz, which comes to mind. "Charleston-Savannah Marine Operator", she said a thousand times a day....(c;]

This is what two 4-400A modulator tubes look like in normal service. They are in push-pull plate modulating the two 4-400A final RF amps you can see through the window in this transmitter from RCA: Every few months, the harder driven modulators are swapped with the RF PA tubes to make them all last a little longer before swapping out all 4 tubes after a "few thousand hours" of operation, if you're lucky....(c;]

Thanks to Jim Hawkins' Radio Museum for the excellent photography:

"Real radio glows in the dark!" (It used to. Now, 50KW uses these for finals): little hot-swappable modules with powertab switchers on tiny heatsinks: This is a 2000 watt RF power amp that's 95% efficient. Notice the quarter for size comparison.

Radio isn't near as exciting as it used to be with monthly flashovers and molten plates. Nobody goes to the transmitter except to blow out the filters and MUFFIN FANS, and changeout the modules the control computer doesn't like!

Ah, the crackle of the AM marine HF in the pilot house from the eerie glow of St Elmo's Fire under a big cumulonimbus monster above the mast.....

"Squelch? What's squelch??"

2150 USN Test station - "Charleston Test Control, Charleston Test Control, Glitter Delta, radio check, over?" (from my 1940's TBK-15 beast in after radio II, USS Everglades (AD-24))

"Glitter Delta, Five by Five, ovah?" (from half way across the Atlantic on 2150 AM to the longwires between the masts....while Radio Central's

500 watt URC-32 SSB rigs with whips couldn't raise a boat....(c;]

"Chief? Didn't you guys need to call back to Charleston?" (smartass ET1 Butler calling from ancient Radio II knowing full well Radio Central had been calling for hours with broken contacts....hee hee.

The comm officer hated me. I'd run phone patches for crew and my captain through a ham friend, Cliff, K4OKD, on James Island, SC, to captain's wife from the Med just fine. Captain wanted to know why he could talk to his wife on "Butler's Heathkit in the cal lab" and a half million dollars in Navy comm center couldn't call home. I had 4 572B's in parallel built into an old HP 524B monster freq counter chassis from salvage to boost the Heathkit HW-101's little output past a kilowatt to the dipoles up the mast. Amazing what you can build from Navy Supply....(c;]

legg wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Another great reason we stayed a lot on RTTY:

"You say my ham radio causes interference. Could you hear my voice and what I was saying?"

".......no...."

"Well, then, how do you know it was me if you couldn't hear my voice?"

(crickets chirping in the silence)....

You don't have to own a transmitter to be responsible for every dead toaster in a 10 mile radius. You simply need an antenna on a tower.

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in news:lY6dnTmfAY8Hg9rQnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

"Boys! Boys! Now stop throwing those trucks at each other in the sand box or you're going to be back in the Principal's Office, AGAIN, and she'll call your parents, AGAIN!"

The Playground Teacher.

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in news:i9edndPZaP1N0trQnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

You'll LOVE the memories and pictures of the Crosleys, ABB and finally the Collins transmitters on this webpage. Stories are at the bottom. Jim does a wonderful job wheedling out great stuff about every station he visits.

Click back on his main page to the WLW pages and see the 500,000 watt transmitter that's STILL THERE! That's Crosley's main radio station built by Crosley himself!

"70 year old Western Electric 7A transmitter is used by WLW between 10:45 and

12:15 1/1/00 to celebrate Y2K. See this transmitter below. Message from WLW CE, Paul Jellison about the event:

I spent the evening at the 700 WLW site babysitting for the dreaded y2k "crash" as suspected it was a whimper of a situation. Since I was a captive audience I decided to amuse myself. My idea was to operate into the millennium operating WLW on the original 1927 model Western Electric

7a 50 kW transmitter. This is the original 50 kW transmitter that WLW signed on with in 1928. It has been maintained and updated quite well through the years. It is still water cooled and operates very quietly compared to a blower cooled transmitter. After replacing a tube in the RF exciter that had failed sometime in the last month or so, the transmitter came up just fine. I put it on the air at 10:45 PM the 31st of 1999 and operated it till 12:15 am January 01,01,2000. Using a modern audio processor(Orban 9100) to modulate the rig with. It sounded fine and the news department mentioned the fact that we were operating on it in their news casts. I seemed fitting that the transmitter that carried information from the depression era, W.W.II, Korea, Vietnam, man landing on the moon, Kennedy's assassination, FDR's passing, and Nixons impeachment usher the station into the year 2000. The transmitter was taken offline as a main transmitter in 1975 when a Continental 317c1 was installed to operate in main service."

Also, tell them to stop eating the cat poop.

An Angry Parent

Nixon was never impeached. He resigned.

Clinton was impeached for the heinous crime of getting a BJ in the oval office.

Hope This Helps! Rich

No, he was impeached for lying under oath.

That and possession of a contraband Cuban cigar.

tm

I saw it, decades before Jim Hawkins was there. I got to open the rear doors, anfd look inside.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

Here's a variable inductor I recently put together with a 7/16" polystyrene tube a ferrite rod and 660/46 litz wire. Variable from about 25 uh to 250 uh. Q= 570 at max inductance.

Mikek

"amdx" wrote in news:9fce2$4d4ab70a$18ec6dd7$11519 @KNOLOGY.NET:

OK for receiving....no good for transmitting.

Yes but over 30.

-- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)

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"amdx" wrote in news:9fce2$4d4ab70a$18ec6dd7$11519 @KNOLOGY.NET:

This is one of the finest antenna loading coils made for ham radio mobile. The company is gone as Henry retired. I have 4 of his best coils, including this one and two that are BIGGER....10" diameter, #6 plated wire about 2' long. you vary the inductance with a shorting tap, requiring the coil wire to handle LOTS of current in the shorted section from induction from the non-shorting section. This creates a huge H wave to reinforce the E wave from the long whip. "Texas Bugcatcher" coils easily create 10db more field strength than any other mobile antenna. Two of mine in series will tune a 15' length of steel rods with a huge capacitor hat down to 1.8Mhz with excellent radiation on 160 meters. My

650 watt solid state amp mobile has a better signal than most land stations at 500 miles!

It's all stored away. Too much theft and breakins these days. No rigs to steal any more in any of my cars......dammit.

No it isn't, Larry. That's the same photo of you that you posted on news:alt.binaries.pictures.radio, years ago.

--
You can't fix stupid. You can't even put a band-aid on it, because it's
Teflon coated.

Hmmm....

-- Boris

A leap year.