On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Tio Pedro wrote:

My HE-30 Lafayette is virtually useless on 40 CW; it constantly
walks... I'm looking for some suggestions for circuit mods to
attempt to tame it down a bit. Schematic is on Bama.

That's the one that's sort of a clone of the S-38?

There's the classic modification article in "73" about 1964, where
someone trading it in has to undo all the modifications, and just
as he gets to the store he remembers one last thing he hadn't undone.

There was an Indian ham who wrote quite a few articles in the late sixties
and early seventies, and he had an article in QST about 1971 or '72 which
I thought was about the S-38. That particular article was about his
odd method of receiving CW, go for a really low tone (and he explained
why, I can't remember the details), but he talked about the troubles
he had with stability. I think he solved it with a crystal controlled
converter (I think he had two articles about that one, a 7360 based
converter that was like the front end in a QST receiver, complete with
front end Q-multiplier, and then a mosfet version of the same basic
design).

You should be reading Popular Communication this month. Some guy
is writing about his first Lafayette receiver.

But seriously, when I saw that, it reminded me not of having
that early receiver, but of finding an entry in home hanyman's
encyclopedia for that first Lafayette receiver of yours. I guess
it was put out by Mechanix Illustrated, and had some articles from
Electronics Illustrated. Not that much, but when I was 10 or 11
and looking for electronic and radio things to read, finding the
few in there was great. Unfortunately, I can't find the specific
volume, that I did look for after noticing your column in the
magazine.

Michael VE2BVW