"Kachina 78" wrote in message
...
I fired up the SW-4A this morning, and I'm monitoring Radio Australia, at
0915
UTC, on 9590khz. I've got it hooked up to the Antenna Supermarket
Eavesdropper
SWL Sloper. I'm the original owner, and no I'm sorry, but it's not for
sale. I
purchased it in 1975, from Trigger Amateur Electronics, in River Forest,
Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. I've never had to change a tube, or a
filter
capacitor, and the crystal controlled direct frequency dialing is still
dead-on
accurate.I believe this was the first shortwave receiver to offer the
crystal
controlled direct frequency dialing.

The radio's local oscillator is only half crystal controlled. The bands are
determined by which crystal is switched in and the actual local oscillator
frequency is determined by a permeability tuned oscillator. Similiar PTOs
(without crystals) have been used in car radios for decades.

Other Drake radios going back to the late 50s have used pretty much the same
setup.

Drake's PTO setup has very good frequency stability and is easy to tune.


I'd be interested to know if anyone has
one in their shack, and how it's holding up. Good DXing to you from the
Chicago
burbs, Gary

I bought one off from another contributor to this group. It's still a good
performer, and I like it. However, some of my other radios suit me better.
I like to spin a main tuning knob across several bands to get a sense of
what's hot at that time. I then tune across a band using a bandspread dial.
The Drake, with it's 500 kHz bands and preselector, is alsmost imposssible
to be used this way. Also, there's many more stations outside the Drake's
tuning range these days.

Frank Dresser