Radio Society of Greater Bixby

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.