Thursday, March 18, 2021
Out of the blue a few days ago, I was browsing eBay’s newest radio auction listings and up popped something rarely seen — a Hallicrafters HA-20 VFO, the matching VFO for the Hallicrafters SR-400 and SR-400A transceivers.
The remote VFO allows you to operate split, using the VFO to transmit or receive, and it also gives you something ahead of its time — Dual Receive.
As fans of Hallicrafters gear will attest, the HA-20 VFO is rare as hen’s teeth; I paid nearly as much for the HA-20 as I did for the SR-400 and matching power supply. But frankly, they come up for sale so infrequently, I couldn’t pass up the chance to buy it. I did sleep on it, but the next day it was still listed and I jumped on it.
I hated to spend that much money on it, but these units are very scarce. If I was going to get one, I had to act. It was shipped from Central Indiana and is already here in fine shape.
Now the HA-20 is missing the OA2 voltage regulator tube. I have one already coming, it should arrive this Saturday. But the unit looks to be in original condition and unmodified.
I haven’t made any contacts with the SR-400, though I have spent time listening with it and testing the transmitter. The transceiver came with a D-104 Night Eagle that is wired for it, and according to the seller, he got great audio reports with that mic.
Could I sell the now-complete station and get my money back? I’m not sure about that. I probably could, given the fact that I now have the elusive HA-20. But the truth is that I bought the Cyclone (and now, the HA-20) to keep, not to resale for a profit.
I have gear I need to shed, however — particularly gear that needs some attention that I have yet to work on. One of the problems is that like the Cyclone station so much that it now occupies my work bench area. I have several chores to get to that require space on the work bench — including replacing the power supply caps in a TS-520SE, and taking a closer look at a Swan 350 that has no output and a very nice Heathkit HW-101 with no receive.
But first, I will wait for the missing OA2 tube to arrive. Once I have it in hand, I’ll go ahead and unbox the HA-20 and check its operation.
At some point in the near future, I’m going to need to shelve the Cyclone station for a while so I can clear Studio C of extra gear that I need to repair and keep or repair and put up for sale.
ANTENNA QUESTION ANSWERED. Several weeks ago, I had a concrete crew working to pour a concrete pad for a metal garage I’m going to have built this spring. One leg of the inverted vee that serves Studio C was tied off on the side of my barn, and I assumed it was in the way of the construction crew. However, I never stopped to actually check where that leg of the dipole was situation. I didn’t really see much change in the antenna tuner settings inside Studio C.
Well, I check it out a couple of days ago, and the end of the dipole was indeed in their way; what they did was to tie it off on the side of the barn, though they didn’t tie it off with the small diameter rope that I used — they simply wrapped the antenna wire a couple of times around a nail securing the metal siding on the barn! Well, the antenna has continued to work well on my 80 meter CW net and my nightly monitoring of 75 meter roundtables.
Before my garage can be built, I’m going to have to cut the tree down that serves as the center support of that inverted vee. I’ll have to find another way to support the antenna, but that’s ok. The feedline that serves my inverted vee on the north side of the house can just as easily be routed to an upstairs window in Studio C.
More to come … 73 es CUL … de KY4Z …. SK …. SK …. (dit dit) ….