On Mar 16, 3:50Â am, Dave Heil wrote:
wrote:
On Mar 9, 4:10� pm, Dave Heil wrote:
wrote:
On Mar 5, 3:20� pm, Dave Heil wrote:
wrote:
On Mar 3, 2:40�pm, Michael Coslo wrote:

Except for the reuse of possibly-contaminated 55-gal drums it all
sounds good.

Yeah, I've thought about it a great deal. Â I once bought a loaf of
French bread on the street which
came wrapped in a letter I'd discarded in the trash. Â It didn't bothe
r
me too much since I'd already gotten used to picking the baked
weevils out of the bread.

You owe me a new keyboard for that story.

The dial drum of the Southgate Type 7.... The
good copy was printed
on translucent Mylar and put on the drum.

That's a pretty inventive way to handle a homebrew dial.

TNX. Not a single new part was used. It's done a good job these past
dozen years.

It sounds remarkably like the way Hammarlund handled the
dial/illumination in the HQ-215.

That's what inspired the design, except there's no dial cord in the
Type 7. IIRC, the HQ-215 lamps aren't *inside* the dial drum, are
they?

I received the data from Engineering.

Good. Ms. Yardley sends greetings.

Unlike receiving tubes with their shiny
flashed getters, high power tubes often
use the anode or a coating as
the getter, and need to operate at high temperature to work.

I've read the eham thread and have even participated.

Excellent!

I'm forced to admit that I've got many of the original
transmitting and
receiving guides. Â When I sold industrial electronics for
Hughes-Peters,
I rescued an old Eimac three-ring binder from the trash.
 It contains
the specs for most early and late Eimac bottles along with
applications
notes and design info for amateur amplifiers. Â

Priceless stuff!

Quite a number of those
notes and articles were done by Bill Orr W6SAI (SK).
 I consider Bill's
articles to be excellent.

I agree. Those articles and notes often go far beyond mere
specifications and general data, too. They often explain *why*
something is done, not just what to do.

A lot of the info is rather subtle. For example, if one is used to
receiving and low-power transmitting tubes with their silvery flashed
getters, where overheating causes the getter to lose its silvery
appearance, it is counter-intuitive that the gettering action of high
power transmitting tubes can actually depend the plate reaching high
temperatures. Or that, in the case of high-gain glass tetrodes like
the 4-125A, running lightly loaded can cause the glass of the tube to
soften from electron bombardment.

I think that a lot of things were tossed in the 1970s-1990s because
folks thought they'd never be needed again. Can't tell you how many
tubes and tube-related parts I acquired in those years for little or
nothing, because the folks getting rid of it thought nobody would ever
need or want it in the future.

This sort of thing even happens in the aerospace industry. A lot of
documentation was simply dumped as programs ended. Rocket engine
designers are going to museums to see how it was done in the past, and
have the problem of seeing what was done but not why.

I can't tell you how many leftovers I have from buying material for a
project. Â When I lived in Cincy, I used to hit the scrap bins of a
plastics distributor so I have quite a bit of scrap teflon, nylon and
lucite rod, sheet and tube. Â Finding it when I want it is the hard
part.

Same here.

How's this for scrounging:

When this house got new siding back a few years, the antenna mast had
to come down so the siding could be put on. But when the mast was to
be reinstalled, I needed some spacers to make everything line up
correctly.

Machining metal to do the job would have been a big deal. Wood was
easy but would be a maintenance job, exposed to the weather. PVC was
too soft and not available in the right sizes anyway.

Then I remembered that relatives had redone their kitchen some years
earlier, and had gotten white Corian countertops installed. The
installers had left some Corian scraps behind. The relatives
had kept them, figuring there had to be some use for such wonderful
material.

Sure enough, the scraps were still available for the asking. I got
some and made the exact spacer blocks needed. Tough, weatherproof,
easy to machine, and even the right color.
Don't want fancy. Want functional.

Keeping the XYL happy, serves a function.

Agreed.

 Keeping visiting hams from
laughing, serves a function.

They don't laugh when they see the contest scores.

I'm not above that. Â My last crank up tower from
Tashjian/Tri-Ex had a
crate built from 22-foot-long California 2x4's and
some long, narrow
strips of plywood. Â I kept it all. Â I'd never even seen 22' piec
es of
2x4 stock prior to getting these. Â They're reddish in color
and are of
some sort of pine not often found here in the East.

The only places I've seen such long pieces of 2x4 were in old balloon-
framed houses. One reason balloon-framing ended was the availability
and cost of such wood.

Well, these 3,000 to 5000 square foot mega-homes
have been cropping up
everywhere in the past decade.

We call them "McMansions" in these parts. But that really applies more
to the 4,000-8.000+ sf houses we see.

It is not unusual around here to see a perfectly good house from the
1950s to 1970s bought and torn down by a developer so a McMansion can
be built. The value is in the land - often the price of the new place
is twice that of the old. The current housing bust has mostly put an
end to that, but not completely. More than a few locals are up in arms
because it means less "affordable" housing units.

The amateur radio connection to all of this is that often the house
which was torn down had mature trees good for antennas and no CC&Rs.
"Development" often removes at least some of the trees, or they don't
survive the construction process, and the new place is usually CC&R'd
to the max.

 They're much cheaper to heat and cool
than some of the earlier built homes.

That depends on two factors: scaling (as a house gets bigger, the
interior volume grows faster than the exterior wall/roof area) and how
houses are built.

When this house got the work done a couple summers ago, and some walls
were opened, it turned out that there was no insulation. Just a thin
layer of wallboard, 2x4s, 1x10 sheathing (not plywood yet the house is
from 1950) tar paper and mineral siding. Of course insulation and
Tyvek were installed, and then the new siding.

Same here. All about multiple uses.

...and the conservation of space.

More on that below.

The console is the key to strength.

That's why I mentioned the console. Â
Everything heavy sits on it. Â The
four supports for it distribute the weight so that nothing can break
through the door. Â There's one large HF rig, one HF/VHF/UHF rig,
four
rotor control boxes, an HF amp, three remote coaxial switches,
three
watt meters, two speakers, an antenna tune, a RTTY/digital
modem, spare
receiver and a monitor scope on the console. Â Assorted
accessory boxes
sit under the console and there's an LCD computer monitor
and a keyboard
on the desk too.

Beautiful, just beautiful..

One difference is that your console/desk is purpose-built for the
shack. Custom use, IOW. The op desk I use was designed to be multi-
purpose, and has been on several Field Days, as have the Southgate
rigs.

When a thing is built to do just one thing, it can often be made
simple and yet high-performance for that one thing. When it has to do
multiple things, there are always more compromises.

73 de Jim, N2EY