Radio Society of Greater Bixby

Next mtg of the Radio Society of Greater Bixby is Thursday before the Hamfest in Norman OK on the 24th and 25th. (See HamHoliday dot com. Tickets are Ten Bucks, and tables are another Fifteen.)

Phillip KI5PFV in Winchester divined that this tower is next to Costco off Memorial around 103rd and even sent in his own pic, taken on a sunnier day. We’ll have more tower pics in the future.

The Show n Tell was overwhelmed by Tom WA5MAZ who just bought a Yaesu 2100B 600W linear to go with his (Raytheon) SBE-34 HF rig. Warned that the caps might be bad, he thought twice about turning it on, but all it did was show 2400V and popped a few times. Works. There was a problem keying it with his SBE, but he adapted the -20V to plus 12, and also filed down a spark induced spur on the finals tuning capactor. He is running it at half power into RG58 feeding his 40M dipole.

This is the bottom of a Yaesu FL 2100B Linear amp (w two tubes). How many parts can you identify? How about the two fan motors? The input and output PL connectors. Anything else? MAZ also showed a HomeMade 2 tone audio generator for testing SSB transmitters. Looks professional.

Other Show n Tell items were an AM/FM/SW radio with solar panel and USB input, a QFX R37 for $25 on eBay. Good sound. A quarter century old Yaesu VX5 H/T has a new battery and charge cord (also for $25 on eBay). The Y. VX5 receives AM to 16Mc, FM broadcast, AM aircraft 118-136, and 220 plus transmits FM on 6M, 2M, and 440.

MEETING MINUTES: In the absence of any club officers, we held a meeting anyway to decide which date to continue, 2nd or 4th Thursday. We decided to continue both dates bc it’s so much fun. Still the same, No dues, No business meeting, and a Tech program every month at Scott’s hamburgers (in the back Party Room) 7 to 8:15 PM on 2nd and 4th Thursdays. MEETING ADJOURNED by voice vote.

First to arrive John KI5OYW won early arrival prize of a ferrite and magnesium forever match, and brought along his new Power Pole crimpers and supplies. Tom WA5MAZ showed his newly made Under Window coax passage made of brass strip and a female UHF connector. Larry W5LQF had a selection of those old HBO and other premium channel filters that the cable company put in your cable feed to filter out channels you weren’t paying for.

Most of our meeting time was spent discussing and dissecting ferrite cores Kenny KJ5EKW brought in, one of the variety looking as if it’d come right out of the ARL end fed antenna kit. See pic below.

Note: If you want to build an End Fed kit, Gabe K5LDX has some made up. Look him up on QRZ dot com. He was showing them at the TARC Field Day in Haikey Creek Park.

As advertised, we did explain and debunk the idea that it doesn’t matter about the amount of copper below the U part of a home made J-Pole antenna. RF will flow down there, radiate, and mess up the radiation pattern of the antenna. Phillip KJ5PFV bypassed the 5 foot tall J controversy with 3 beautiful examples of quarter wave ground planes, copper wire and a chassis mount UHF connector for 2M, 220, and 440 bands with 19. 13, and 6 inch dimensions .

Dr Mark and Rosemary, NM0D & KE5CMS, hosted the Evergreen Church Group (EverGreenCG . org) at their hilltop venue Saturday morning 06.13. It’s a great place for Field Day type operations with a large pond (reflecting ground) and plenty of trees for antenna support and shade. That’s Mark K5LGS in blue.

Kenny KJ5EKW arrived early with his car full of: backpack with a Yaesu 857 all band all mode rig inside; MFJ manual tuner; large (4 in) screen VNA; hundred Amp LifePo; table and chairs, and a six foot (the yellow stick on the ground) high power Sling Shot to put his 88 foot end fed antenna in the trees. After setup he went back home to get his mom.

Deb K5DBE and Sam KJ5BJR also showed up. In this pic Lt Dan K5CAY has his (red) chair and wide range (25 to 1000 Mc) Discone antenna out of the car. Almost out of sight in hte previous pic, Denny KI5VWF is down by the pond with his Yaesu 891 HF and 6M rig. Evergreen group meets 2nd Saturday at the church on 111th, and talk on 145.25 Mon and Thurs at 7PM.

Tom WA5MAZ, having renewed his license after a few decades, has also renewed his SBE-34 HF rig by replacing a couple of electrolytic capacitors, one of which has begun to exude white stuff. The SBE 34 came out in late 1960s, well before the Kenwood 520 and Yaesu 101. The SBE was all tubes and had No noise blanker, No speech compressor, No crystal dial calibrator, and didn’t run all bands. What it did have was a low price, over 50W output, and a VFO. It worked. Tom bought another one at a recent Hamfest for 75 bucks, and after fixing a debilitating error in IF tuning, now has 2 good rigs on which he’s contacted 46 of the 48 states (all but Idaho and N.Mexico) plus Guam, and all on 40M.

Pictured above are Tom MAZ and Larry W5LQF who brought in some of his old equipment, 5 vertical antennas (which MAZ took home); an SDR radio (which Phillip PFV took home), and assorted other items. Larry LQF is another ‘experienced’ Ham whose interest has been rekindled recently (using a recent Yaesu 2M monoband rig to join the “Tech Net” on 146.91 at 7PM on Wed and Friday nights).

LQF also brought in an SDR radio which Phillip KI5PFV volunteered to take home to see if he can make work. SDRs typically have a wide range and work multiple modes.

The rest of the ‘program’ was a review of ARL Field day rules, noting that it only takes ‘three persons’ to run a Class A station on Field Day, also a review of 2 dipole antennas they used to advertise in the magazines, one a scam with .01 capacitors in each leg (that had no noticeable effect), and another with a hundred Ohm resistor in the center that assured a SWR of less than 2 (true, and the thing worked reasonably well With Any Length of Wires attached). A final segment was how Leo W0GFQ of Council Bluffs IA made hundreds of thousands of crystals for the Army in WWII. The trick was grinding dozens at a time using a drill press, and a Hallicrafters receiver to monitor the progress without having to test each crystal separately. The result was our Sherman tanks could instantly switch any of 10 channels while German tiger tanks had to painstakingly tune their radios with a VFO.

Attending were (Left to Right) Kenny KJ5EKW, Jon W5JCN, Mike KI5YX, Tom WA5MAZ, and newly licensed Ham Anthony KJ5PUZ who has a Tiny SA spectrum analyzer in his hand, a similar and much more fun to use device that uses the same basic parts as a VNA, a wideband sweep generator and matched receiver. 2 of the four VNA devices brought that night are visible on the table. It’s hard to measure a 40M dipole inside a burger joint so Kenny EKW brought a homemade 220 J-Pole (out of sight above the tripod on the table), and there were a couple other dual band (2M and 440) antennas there also.

We had four (4) VNAs to look at Thurs the 28th. New users will find they are a little difficult to set up, the Chinese word for freq apparently also translates to ‘Stimulus.’ The good news is, once you have it set to show SWR on a particular band, you can save that setup and bring it back easily the next time. Kenny EKW said you can also (before you turn it off) set it to ‘Remember State’ by pressing buttons CONFIG, then EXPERT SETTINGS, and REMEMBERS TATE (that’s not MY typo, that’s the way it’s shown on the Logic Diagram that comes with the VNA).

On first turn on, you get four (4) different colored traces in 4 colors. Step 1 is delete three of them to leave the SWR chart, and then set freq (I mean stimulus – start and stop freqs) for the band you want.

ZQG also brought in the MFJ, demonstrating it on a 2M/440 dual band antenna to Anthony KJ5PUZ (who is reealy new – only 1 radio so far). The MFJ features SWR, R, X, and Z shown all at once for a particular freq, but you have to make your own chart by setting several freqs and writing down the result for each. It also measures other parameters such as Coax Loss by pushing one button.

The MFJ SWR analyzer is easier to use at first, as they say, a much easier learning curve, but it costs $350 new so wouldn’t you like to know how to use the cheaper (and quicker to display a chart) VNA.

Field Day isn’t that far off, only another 6 weeks to make sure the generator works and the LifePo batt is charged. Everybody at the meeting had the rules (1.4 MB ‘Field Day 2026 Packet’ from the ARL) and we discussed whether to go to one of the local clubs and help out their Class A stations or stay home and work Class 1D or 1E, or both. Rules have changed over the years, you no longer have to stay on a band for an hour, and clubs working like 3A or 4A can have a free GOTA station As Well As a VHF/UHF station to talk to locals on their HTs. (Can’t log people who go home after helping the club.)

John KI5OYW has a QRP rig and an 80/40 fan dipole at home. We advised him, and Tom WA5MAZ who lives not far, said he’d help out with a local test of John’s station. (OYW is also on 2M and 440.)

Rich ZQG brought in specs from a home made 4A power supply; an 8A (maybe more) Motorola that’d served a school bus program for a quarter century (renewed by Rich), and a 20 Amp Kenwood (those pictured above). The 4 Amp weighed 3.1 lbs in a small aluminum chassis, and the Kenwoood at five times the capacity, weighed 5x as much, 14.8 pounds. Inexplicably, the mid size Motorola was 16.9 pounds. Oh weight, they do have a reputation for reliability. One detail on the Mot, it did not have a variable resistor to adjust voltage, instead 2 resistors in series, possibly custom selected at the factory to produce 13.8 out from the series regulator. (Variables can fail at the sliding contact after decades.) Rich said when he got it, no longer working, the two resistors had drifted a bit and the output was 15.5 Volts. (3 to 4 decades under the dispatcher’s desk.)

Tom WA5MAZ (ex KJ5NMH) is making sure his old Motorolas are up to spec, and bot this Gertsch FM deviation meter in Muskogee for 75 bucks. It’s old, full of tubes, and needs to be at a particular temp to be in spec, so comes with A Mercury Thermometer that contains Hg. It’s a normal thermometer reading from minus 20 to 70 deg C. It goes in horizontally, the hole next to the phones jack to sense the temp of the crystal oven. Hey, trivia question: Is human body temperature really 98.6 deg F, and the answer is No, it was originally ‘around’ 37 deg C and the equiv F is 98.6 which implies an accuracy that is excessively precise. Back to radios: Tom has also installed one of the Mot mobiles in his white van with a brand new Mot 5/8 wave antenna on top. That rig has a custom designed Freq and PL tone signal injector (to make the old xtal rig work). It includes a green digital 1 to 16 readout to select one of 16 channels programmed with local freqs. Late Note: He drove it out to 41st and Sheridan for the Saturday night Simplex Net on .55 and heard everyone.

Larry W5LQF brought in some old ceramic plate mounted cheese slicers (variable capacitors) plus a genuine Dan Bosco Electronics ‘Stetho Tracer’ from the early 60s, a pen size demodulator and audio amp that lets you trace signals through a radio receiver. Don Bosco also made a similarly packaged simple square wave signal injector (that put out lots of harmonics) for ten bucks. The demodulator looked the same, pen sized, but came with accessories like a 20 dB attenuator, an earphone, and cost a hundred a fifty bucks, an armful back in the 1950s. Larry’s example looked pristine and had the original paper manual.

Mike KI5YX brought in a TEKTRONIX 2224 digital storage scope to show. Nxt mtg is 2nd Thurs in May. See you on 146.91

Last year at Green Country, I thought there were a lot of books, old Radio Amateur’s Handbooks and Callbooks etc. This year I noticed quite a few Kenwood 520 HF rigs (plain 5 band 520, the 6 b 520S, and economy model 520SE without 12V capability and lacking plugs for the 10 Watt 6M or 2M trans verters. The one above is 6 band 520 SE with matching tuner and speaker. You’ll never find the two transverters (bc they didn’t make very many). No price on this one. The others varied up to $250, but you might’ve gotten the one from Earl WB5UUW for a hundred or less. Estate sale, and no condition stated. I did see one Kenw 820, the eight hundred dollar expensive alternative, worth it at the time bc it was single conversion (to 9 Mc) versus double conversion (600 kc wide at 9, and then crystal filter at 3395) which made the 820 noticeably quieter on 10M (without so much conversion/mixing noise).

A Yaesu 101B was there also, same vintage as the 520 but with Sweep Tubes in the final, an 11M band, and AM mode available (only one reason for that – CB). Sweep tubes bring the plate out through the pins on the base, so there’s a little capacitance there which reduces gain on 10M – less of a problem on the Kenwoods bc they use S-2001 tubes (like the 6146A) with a plate cap that makes them usable up through 2M freqs. It was marked $100 and the LandLiner phone patch another $50. Oh, on the tables selling tubes you could buy 6146 types for ten ($10) bucks.

You always need a spare power supply and there was an Astron 20 marked $100 and a more capable Astron 35M (with meters) for $150. I liked the MFJ 4035 with meters going to 35 Amps marked $10.

I know the bad part is in here somewhere. I’ll just keep replacing parts until it starts working.

This is why you go to a Hamfest. Say you’re thinking about a Coax Switch for your station. , Go to the Fest and you’ve got your choice of dozens, 2 position, 4 position, 5 (one for ground).

Tom WA5MAZ (ex KJ5NMH) brought in some old Motorola stuff again, a tube type portable 2M rig from back before you were born. He made this 90V power supply to test the tiny jelly bean size tubes to find (surprisingly) they all worked. Listen on 146.91 Wed and Friday at 7 to hear the old rigs work (and be aware he has also synthesized both Crystals and PL tones to do so.)

Rich ZQG reviewed the BA club program from a few days ago, summarizing Emergency Power by suggesting a 100 Ah LifePo battery; five hundred dollar Harbor Freight generator (not the Inverter type because they make RF noise), and a $130 Hbr Frt solar panel.

Back in the 1950s the FCC license test had requirements like ‘Draw a 5 tube radio schematic.’ We reviewed a schematic of one using 50L6, 35Z5, and some with 12 Volt filaments, and decided, Yes, it’s possible for five tubes to work, and even cover the HF range as did the Hallicrafters S-38 (made in the 1950s).

We meet 2wice a month, 2nd and 4th Thursday, at Scott’s hamburgers downtown Bixby 7 to 8:15PM.