Stan Barr wrote:
On Sun, 07 Jan 2007 09:26:41 -0500, Roger D Johnson wrote:

Virtually all of the high end military vacuum tube boat anchors were
designed before SSB became common. They require an external converter
or the addition of a product detector and AGC mods to work properly.

My Racal RA-17 works fine on SSB, you just have to remember to adjust the
attenuator and/or IF gain to stop the detector overloading. Agc is
switchable for short/long time constant. There are external ssb and isb
adapters, the set has connectors for one, but I've not found one yet...

I'll put a good word in for the RA-17 as well. Ergonomically I think it's
a little better than the R-390A, and it's a lot easier to work on, though
I don't think the RF performance as good.

On the other hand, it's a lot better than the newer solid-state Racal
receivers. I was really shocked to compare the R-17 with an R-1750
on a marine install... CW stuff that was easy to copy on the R-17 was
down in the noise floor on the newer receiver.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."