JoanD'arcRoast wrote:

In article , dave
wrote:


D Peter Maus wrote:

Telamon wrote:

In article ,
D Peter Maus wrote:


I remember, after several months playing with my S-53A, tuning
through a ham band, hearing that duck quack that could only be SSB
without a BFO, and pulling up the toggle marked 'CW.' Slowly tuning
across the band--actually, I was looking for CW on the lower end--I
heard one of the ducks become intelligible for an instant.

That got my attention.

I went back and tried to duplicate that moment by tuning very
slowly through any of duck quacking I could find. And I did succeed,
on the 80 meter band, in receiving SSB, with the CW BFO. Working my
way through the HF spectra, I succeeded in other bands as well. I was
about at 40 meters when my grandfather walked to the door.

"Do you know what you've done, here?"

I didn't have a clue.

So, he explained it to me. But I was convinced that given the CW
offset of the BFO, that I would only be able to receive LSB. USB
would be outside the passband.

Um...not so much.

The BFO had been zero beat tuned with incoming carriers by
previous owners. Which meant I could pull both USB and LSB through
the relatively narrow IF (though wide by comparison to today's sets.)

It was one of the most exciting discoveries I'd made in my
limited radio experience back then.

The next time I was at my grandfather's house, he took me down to
his radio room and let me play with his big boy toys. The Hammarlund
(which I have now,) a pair of RME's, and an FM tuner by Hallicrafters.

I've rarely had that much fun with radio. Especially getting
to swing that big-ass tri bander around in the back yard.

Things accelerated pretty quickly from there. And got out of
control right away.



Anyone have similar moments of discovery/revelation?

That's the way single side band detection works Peter.


I understand that. That's not my point. The switch was marked CW. And
it was fixed, and supposed to have been offset. So when the incoming was
centered in the passband, a 1khz tone was heard. Putting one sideband
always out of the passband. In this case, the upper.

By having the BFO tuned to zero beat when the phantom carrier was in
the center of the passband, I could then receive both sidebands as
necessary.

Primitive. And it worked.

When my grandfather showed me what I'd actually done, and we did the
math, it was pretty clear.

And keep in mind this was in the very early days, for me. I'd just
stepped out of my first crystal sets into this Halli. So this was
exciting stuff.

So, my question....anyone else had similary exciting revelations
during the early days?



I could shave off a sideband pretty cleanly with my R-390A 2 kc
mechanical filter. Judicious use of the BFO PTO, the RF gain and the KC
tuning knob allowed very clean SSB reception.


Mom got a new kitchen radio (with FM -- woohoo) so I got the old
plastic (GE?) AM tabletop... I unsoldered and re-soldered wires (with a
wood-burning stylus) at random on the front end, and lo and behold!
Radio Havana and Radio Moscow and BBC! I was hooked! (I was ten years
old... and remember soldering while the radio was plugged into the AC
mains -- HA,HA!)
-j

My revelation came when I connected a homemade digital frequency display
to my Hallicrafters S-20R for the first time in 1977. It cost about $100
to build it back then. It opened up a whole new world of accurate
frequency readout. It was a real luxury in those days.