Thread: S-38B Question
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Old March 12th 12, 04:21 PM posted to rec.radio.amateur.boatanchors
Michael Black[_2_] Michael Black[_2_] is offline
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First recorded activity by RadioBanter: Mar 2008
Posts: 618
Default S-38B Question

On Mon, 12 Mar 2012, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Channel Jumper wrote:

The radio is of little value - since it only did CW AM and has no
SSB....
Just looking on Flea Bay tells me that they had issues with the
cardboard on the rear of the radio - lot's of reproductions.


Sure it will do SSB! The BFO isn't adjustable, but the IF is wide as a
barn, wide enough that you can just set it on CW and then tune back and
forth until you get clear audio. Mind you it's unusable in a pileup...


Which was often the case for a lot of receivers. They had BFOs but
weren't so great when SSB came along, or required you to turn back the RF
gain a lot (so the BFO was strong compared to the incoming signal), which
made it relatively insensitive.

They weren't good receivers, but neither were a lot of low end ones back
then. But we bought them because we couldn't afford something better.

It wasn't a good choice, but a lot of people did start by shortwave
listening, so they got a general coverage receiver. A ham band only
receiver tended to be more expensive. So they had to live with a receiver
that wasn't particularly great for the ham bands, until they could
scrounge something better.

When I got my Hallicracter's S-120A in the summer of 1971, it was the
cheapest I could get, and almost more than I could afford, using up all
the birthday money saved in my relatively new bank account. It was junk,
not just cheap like the S38, but solid state and thus made worse because
the thing overloaded badly. But at the time, getting a ham license seemed
some years in the future, since at the time you had to be 15 or older to
get a license in Canada. So I bought that receiver, and never got much
out of it. At least it wsa a time when there were lots of SW broadcast
sttions, and I could thrill to WWV on six frequencies. And yes, it did
"well" on CB, because there were local signals, and when the band opened
up, it was wall to wall heterodynes.

It didn't do SSB, until I put a potentiometer between the antenna and the
antenna terminals and reduced signals so the BFO was strong enough,
leaving very few signals that were strong enough. But it wsa a period
when there were some AM stations, I thought at the time they were younger
and doing AM as "something new" but maybe not, maybe they just never
switched to SSB. So I could listen to them every night on 80m and it was
sort of what ham radio must have sounded like in earlier decades.

And then five months later, I read in the paper that the law was changing,
so you didn't need to be fifteen to get a ham license in Canada.

I couldn't use that receiver for CW, not enough selectivity, so I was
reduced to a record to learn the code. And then I was lucky, someone at
the ham club when I finally found it lent me an SP-600 (I had it for about
a decade), so I actually had a decent receiver. (It didn't do anything
differently than the S-120A when it came to SSB either, except it was a
much better receiver, much more sensitive and of course more selective, so
when I turned down the RF gain to use the BFO properly, there were still
plenty of SSB signals to receive.

Michael VE2BVW