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need advice aligning a vaccum tube spectrum analyzer
Hello, everyone.
It looks like I have a new, exciting, rather daunting project ahead of me. I'd like some advice from anyone interested in providing it. I have now adopted into my household (and home lab) a Lavoie LA-18M spectrum analyzer unit, circa 1950's, completely tubes plus a few microwave crystal diodes. I also have a manual. The manual is missing the overall schematic diagram of the entire unit but has schematic diagrams of all the major sections, such as the IF strips, and it also has general troubleshooting procedure. Given its age, it is in outstanding condition, because everything about it works. Given the fact that I bought it for only 50 bucks, as a working antique it is an absolute treasure. However, I am concerned about the weak signal sensitivity. For calibration equipment, I have a late year 100 Mhz analog scope, a Wavetek 3001 signal generator, and a digital multimeter, if that helps. With the signal generator I was able to determine that the minimal discernable signal at 10 Mhz was -34dBm. The manual on the Lavoie indicates that the sensitivity at that frequency should be 40 microvolt, so that seems to tell me that age has affected the sensitivity. There are several IF strips on the unit, and the manual tells me which strip needs to be aligned first, but it does not go into any detail about how to align each of the IF strips for best performance... it merely says "replace IF strips as necessary". If I had a time machine I could probably follow the manual's suggestions, but short of that I am out of luck there. I also understand that the alignment procedure for AM IF strips is differerent from FM IF strips, and for IF strips used by spectrum analyzers it could be different still. So, does anyone have any advice for me on how I should peak each vaccum tube IF strip. I will supply specific information on each, and will email scans of the schematics for each, to those who want to consider the problem. Thanks, The Eternal Squire |
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