Sunday, July 12, 2020
My plan was to spend part of the afternoon in Studio C messing around with my Heathkits — my HW-101, and my two SB-102s. My trip upstairs was delayed because my wife got a wild hair to clean up her corner of the library.
As it turned out, I nearly everything that was piled around her chair was something I had to look at before they threw it away. While I was annoyed, I’m also damn glad I was there. I don’t know how they ended up over in her corner, but an envelope containing two complete sets of Heathkit O-rings was in her stack of “stuff!” I bought them 3 years or so ago, and had them on a shelf inside the door of the shack. How that envelope ended up where it did is a mystery, but I was delighted they turned up. Once the cleaning was done, I took the O-rings upstairs and promptly installed four of them — two on the preselector of each SB-102, both of which had dial cords intact on the final and load control.
One of the SB-102s has the original RCA jack for the RF output, and I couldn’t really check it out with an antenna until I buy or cobble together some sort of adapter. But the other one has an SO-239, and I did get to check that one out. While the bands weren’t real active, I found stations on 20 and 40 meters, and the Heathkit sounded great, at least on receive.
I was impressed by how minimal the drift was once it warmed up. The VFO has some slip, and just like any VFO without a gear drive, you have to tune carefully. I have not checked the transmit on the rig yet, but plan to tonight. I may try to check in on the Georgia CW net with the rig, who knows??
The SB-102 is equipped with the optional CW filter, which worked fine. The rig really took me back to my early days of hamming. The SB-102 was my second HF rig, and the first rig I owned that was useful on CW. Thanks to the SB-102, I worked a lot of CW on the rig and without realizing it, ended up with my speed at 13wpm plus. I took the code test for general on a whim and damned if I didn’t pass it!
The guy I rode to the test session with was there to take the Advanced Class written and he failed. He had talked me into going with him just for company, I had no idea I could pass the damn code test!
I sold the SB-102 and was sorry I let it go from the time I sold it. I sold it to help finance the purchase of a Yaesu FT-757GX, which in 1990, was the bee’s knees in solid state transceivers. The main problem with the FT-757GX was that the receiver front end was easily overloaded by strong signals on phone and CW. Contesting was tough, but you could always tell if you were close to a big gun somewhere on the band, lol.
I think I have an SB-102 out in the barn. If I recall, the rig appears rode hard and put up wet; I think I may have an SB-101 floating around somewhere as well. But this is the first time I’ve had the rig, the power supply and a damn cable all in the same room so I can connect them together. I’m going to head back to the shack and check the transmit on the one SB-102. If no joy, I’m going to look at installing the one o-ring on the final control of the HW-101. I need to cobble together an adapter, RCA to PL-259. Off the to shack!!