On Aug 26, 11:30*am, laura halliday wrote:
Indeed. I have several old ARRL and RSGB Handbooks and a
number of older references (including Single Sideband for the
Radio Amateur).

You can see the fashions change. At one time the cool part to
use was the 7360 beam deflection mixer tube; at other times the
challenge was to see how many 40673 MOSFETs you could use
in a single radio. Many of these designs are difficult to reproduce
now.

What's amazing is that some of the SSB rigs appearing in the 60's in
the pages of QST use not one, not two, but three 7360's :-).

40673's were also used with wild abandon. If someone wants an honest-
to-goodness 40673 they can pay $15 for a NTE221 in a metal can, but
most experimenters would use a BF998, obviously a different package
but same function.

I'll see your BC-455 tuning capacitor and raise you an Eddystone
dial. :-)

You can make nice radios by applying the right technology to
the problem. My recipe for a stable VFO nowadays is a
postage-stamp size surface mount board mummified in bubble
wrap and stuck to the end of a good, solid air variable capacitor.

The brass-screw-in-a-solenoid is something I just tried in my
reproduction of the MMR-40 and I am very impressed with its stability
and mechanical simplicity as a PTO. A similar but not identical
mechanical design is used in the WA6OTP PTO, I haven't tried it yet.

Tim.