Michael Black wrote:
Bob Monaghan ) writes:

Wasn't there a recent historical article in QST on the role of the quartz
xtal industry in WWII, how they figured out overtone osc. issues and so
on?

Given that some sources ask $12 and up for scanner and ham crystals, these
costs add up rather fast if you need to replace a bunch of xtals in a
scanner. So the search for alternatives seems quite worthwhile ;-)


But they already figured out the solution, thirty years ago, and
it did not require going to the quarry for quartz and digging out
old QSTs. The need for a lot of crystals luckily coincided with
digital ICs, so before most people could get around to paying for
all the crystals to fill out a mult-channel unit, synthesizers came
along so you only needed one crystal. About as soon as it could be
done practically, hams built them and wrote up articles in the ham
magazines.

Anyone who decides to make their own crystals today, other than
for the sake of doing so (and I admit it would be an interesting
thing to try), will likely find they can't go for the subminiature
look, and probably will find that putting effort into building
a synthesizer still makes sense if you need more than a few
crystals.

Michael VE2BVW


Absolutely: You should only make your own crystals for the same reasons
you'd knap your own stone tools -- to understand how it was done back in
the day, and to have some thing to show off to friends. You could get
crystals much faster by cleaning toilets at McDonald's and buying them
at $12 a pop than you could making them from scratch.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com