With the survivalist market as well as the DIYers who would build a
kit I have given thought to the idea of building a new tube shortwave
receiver as a usable, practical set.

That means no regens, no DC bull****, and no plug in coils. It must
have production grade RF and IF coils, a bandswitch, and require
alignment. If sold as a kit the builder will need a RF generator and a
scope (or a spec an or CSM with a track gen).

It should use off the shelf parts even if those shelves are bare, as
it is better to copy an existing item than design from scratch. I
would clone the Eddystone dial mechanism and the bandswitch and coils
from some Hallicrafters or Hammarlund set, they could be sold as
desperately needed replacement spares for the old sets too. I would
use a seeing eye tube mounted in a hole in the dial as opposed to a
meter movement, again, getting a run of new tubes made is possible if
you are buying several thousand. There are some surplus that could be
used if really needed too.

I would use a separate power supply and speaker for several reasons.

I would have the radio take in B+ and heater voltage and put out 600
ohm +4 audio. A regular supply could be used at home or car battery
and a switchmode brick for B+. A headphone jack would be supplied off
this tube.

The set should cover 500 kHz to 30 MHz, AM, SSB and CW, with a
product detector of course. A 455 kHz IF is needed so as to use common
mechanical or crystal filters, which are optional. There should also
be a 455 kHz IF out for an external synchronous detector.

Any other comments?

My guess is that the cost you would have to charge to recoup the time
and effort you put together in coming up with such a design would end
up making such a set *much* more expensive than just going to a ham
fest, buying a Hammarlund in good shape, and fixing it up. Or even
paying someone else to fix it up.

On Nov 11, 12:04*am, David Barts
wrote:
My guess is that the cost you would have to charge to recoup the time
and effort you put together in coming up with such a design would end
up making such a set *much* more expensive than just going to a ham
fest, buying a Hammarlund in good shape, and fixing it up. Or even
paying someone else to fix it up.

I already have a R-390, two Hammarlunds and a Racal....I wanted to
manufacture something. Or at least think about it.

On Nov 11, 4:52*pm, wrote:
*With the survivalist market as well as the DIYers who would build a
kit I have given thought to the idea of building a new tube shortwave
receiver as a usable, practical set.

Most people who are into radio might think you are irrational, because
good short wave reception with tubes has been done by major
manufacturers of the past rather better than you can ever imagine to
achieve, unless you have far greater intelligence than their leading
chief designers wo passed lots of exams and universities and had
passed the test of being jolly good fellows in the real world of
private enterprise employment and marketing activities with the now
mentioned Racal, and Hammlund, Hallicrafters et all, just to name a
few.


*That means no regens, no DC bull****,

Regenerative boost I can understand, but "DC bull****" Such a term
does not appear in any electronic books written prior to 1960 when
tubed radio was regarded as the best mature technology for SW
reception.

and no plug in coils. It must
have production grade RF and IF coils, a bandswitch, and require
alignment. If sold as a kit the builder will need a RF generator and a
scope (or a spec an or CSM with a track gen).

You must be dreamin'. Its not clear at all what you want. Do you wanna
make a radio from scratch, or do ya wanna buy a kit made by some
sucker who is likely to find he'll sell 2 kits over 10 years, and get
a lousy price from YOU?

If ya wanna build just ONE HF receiver for you only, then there's
plenty of old books on making radios, just follow what you read in the
books, de-bug all what you build, as all the manufacturers have done
before you.
What happens first though? Do you die in ten years leaving behind a
mess to clean up and no working radio, or you get a working radio in 3
months, fairly well perfected, and live for 9 years and 9 mths to
enjoy it?

*It should use off the shelf parts even if those shelves are bare, as
it is better to copy an existing item than design from scratch. I
would clone the Eddystone dial mechanism and the bandswitch and coils
from some Hallicrafters or Hammarlund set, they could be sold as
desperately needed replacement spares for the old sets too.


Ah, just WHO is going to clone anything from the past and make any
money?

use a seeing eye tube mounted in a hole in the dial as opposed to a
meter movement, again, getting a run of new tubes made is possible if
you are buying several thousand. There are some surplus that could be
used if really needed too.

Your dreamin again. Its totally stupid to expect anyone might sell
thousands of NEW made copies of 1960 SW radios sets without conducting
a thorough market feasibility study. The COMPETION for what you
propose now has become so overwhelming that nobody in their right mind
would consider having say 10,000 new 6BA6, 6BE6 etc manufactured for a
production run of thousands of SW sets.

Before asking us silly questions, have you :-
1. Learnt all about SW tube radio, 2. Drawn up a probable, or
provisional parts list, 3. spent weeks chasing quotes for parts
exactly as yo specifiy, 4, Generally put in a whole lot of work so far
without relying on any of us, who, IMHO, will conclude you are on a
goose chase.

*I would use a separate power supply and speaker for several reasons.

Well of course, but you'll die when you work out the cost of
production for your project is 100 times what people now pay for SW
reception with a whole pile of features you'll probably not want to
include.

*I would have the radio take in B+ and heater voltage and put out 600
ohm +4 audio. A regular supply could be used at home or car battery
and a switchmode brick for B+. A headphone jack would be supplied off
this tube.

*The set should cover 500 kHz to 30 MHz, AM, SSB and CW, with a
product detector of course. A 455 kHz IF is needed so as to use common
mechanical or crystal filters, which are optional. There should also
be a 455 kHz IF out for an external synchronous detector.

All those features have already been well sorted out by old makers.

But there was a magazine called Electronics Australia which has now
been swallowed up by 'Silicon Chip' but they have a CD with the old
magazines monthly output from 1939 to 1965.
http://shop.siliconchip.com.au/radio...ch-1965-1.html

Perhaps within that magazine you'll find full articles about building
good SW radios with tubes which were second to none.

Hardly any of the parts used are now available, but hey, yo issa
dreamer, and you'll just dream them all up.
Reality is that you might spend years building such a set, at a
glacial rate of 1 tube stage per 3 months. My bet is that of the maybe
200 blokes who attempted to build the radios which are so well
described in the magazine, maybe 10 finished a set to a respectable
standard. Magazines became viable, because dreamers bought them.
Mostly do-little nerds as I recall. What's so rivettingly interesting
about SW reception? What form of media entertainament is worth
listening to on SW? What is available on SW which ain't available
elsewhere, apart from a pile of noise, poor audio, whistles, fade
outs, and old amateur blokes droning on and on about their latest
hospital operations? New York police maybe?

I regularly restore old radios. Last job was a 1947 Healing floor
standing 5 band AM radio for the fashionable Bling-Blang generation of
1947, ie, my parents generation. It has a 6J8 mixer plus 6U7 IF, and
is chockoblock with coils and special wafer switches but it does give
remarkably good reception of Radio America of China Calling even in
daytime, with a long wire antenna taken out to a nearby tree. Anyway,
I put in about 130 hours fixin up the old banger, and the one section
I didn't alter at all was the 3 band SW section. Not much alignment
was needed to maximise performance. Local MW was changed to ferrite
rod antenna replacing the horrible high impedance RF input tranny
which worked fine before the present which is riddled with hum
imposing itself on many incoming signals in the electro static portion
of the electromagnetic waves. The ferrite rod reacts to the magnetic
part of the incoming wave which is not affected by compact fluorescent
lamps et all.

But now we have local Digital Radio Broadcasting now all based on
frequencies up around 250Mhz. The local Australian Broadcasting
Commission, or ABC, has just begun trials here for broadcasting of all
they have on MW, 2 stations, and all they have on FM, another 2
stations, on digital. Don't ask me how DAB works. I can't find any
schematics of concise explanations.

So, listeners who have loved their old tubed radio set because it
carried the MW local stations now don't need to use their tubed set,
and can access the old AM station program noise free and with full
audio BW with hi-fi specs from their tiny little box sets for DAB.

Now sometimes ppl with radios capable of SW might try surfing the
bands, but now DAB is here ppl won't be able to surf these SW bands,
but then who ever did ?

There were 101 different ideas put forward for providing a decent
tubed SW radio which never saw commercial development and production,
such as the early synchrodyne. The superhet was deemed to be the best.
Racal had 3 mixers, and was remarkably stable for an old banger but
now with digtally generated oscillator F and all that chipery stuff
and computer controlled stuff, stablity is far better now. Wanna copy
a Yeasu?

If I wanted to build a 6 band SW radio now I think I might have 6 j-
fet RF amp stages well controlled by AVC, then 6 j-fets for
oscillators, and thus not need a special made bandswitch, except some
generic easy to buy wafer switch from Farnells with 6 positions. Mixer
could be one of many options, maybe more than one, to minimise
switching of the IF output. With such cheap small devices with high gm
and low noise, the cost is far less than a complex switch and just two
tubes to work on all bands. But all this is so easy to say, and such
things are easier said than done, and succes relies on YOU. And there
are very few ppl here who are heavily into farnarkling with HF radios,
so there are not many brains here to be picked, or if you do try,
you'll probably get 101 suggestions all requiring maybe years to
perfect and after that you still can't equal the best old sets.
I heard about a bloke who built a CD player using just generic opamps.
It took so long......

Any other comments?

But good luck with you quest. You'll definately need +60dB of that.

Patrick Turner.

Patrick Turner wrote:
But good luck with you quest. You'll definately need +60dB of that.

Patrick, I too was going to write something like that, but you did far
better than I could.

The point that was buried in his original posting was that he is building
an "EMP-PROOF" radio to sell to the survivalist market.

Personally I think it is a fools errand, you can't build a modern radio
similar to the high performing ones of the past at a cost anyone will pay,
since in comparison, you can buy any one of the many old radios that will do,
pay a professional to refurbish and align it, and buy several lifetimes worth
of spare parts for far less.

Not only that but radio collecting is a well known and liked hobby, nobody is
going to take a second look at that old transoceanic on your shelf, but
many would flip out seeing any firearm.

If you are paranoid, you an even find stores in many places where you can buy
a refurbished radio for cash and leave a fake name and address.

Geoff.



--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(

wrote in message
...
With the survivalist market as well as the DIYers who would build a
kit I have given thought to the idea of building a new tube shortwave
receiver as a usable, practical set.

I can't imagine that any rational survivalist would waste power running
tubed electronics. I guess you could hype the EMP issue, but even that can
be handled better with SS.

On Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:52:48 -0800, rrusston wrote:
the bandswitch and coils from
some Hallicrafters or Hammarlund set,

Anyone who'd use the old Halli bandswitch has never had to fix a Halli
bandswitch.

The trouble with valve radios is they use lots of electricity.

"Geoffrey S. Mendelson" wrote:

Patrick Turner wrote:
But good luck with you quest. You'll definately need +60dB of that.

Patrick, I too was going to write something like that, but you did far
better than I could.

The point that was buried in his original posting was that he is building
an "EMP-PROOF" radio to sell to the survivalist market.

SS sets are cheap and easily obtainable.

Even a Happy Harry Home-owner type can cheaply build a
small Faraday cage to keep one in, if anticipating an EMP.

Personally I think it is a fools errand, you can't build a modern radio
similar to the high performing ones of the past at a cost anyone will pay,
since in comparison, you can buy any one of the many old radios that will do,
pay a professional to refurbish and align it, and buy several lifetimes worth
of spare parts for far less.

You'd better invest in a generator and a supply of petrol, too...

Not only that but radio collecting is a well known and liked hobby, nobody is
going to take a second look at that old transoceanic on your shelf, but
many would flip out seeing any firearm.

Your friends are all hoplophobes?

Why would anyone "flip out" when seeing a firearm?
Hell, I have one in my pocket right now, and I can see
two more from where I'm sitting. They don't look all
that spooky to me.

If you are paranoid, you an even find stores in many places where you can buy
a refurbished radio for cash and leave a fake name and address.

Huh?

Where are you posting from? Why would anyone need to
leave his name and address - fake or otherwise - when
purchasing a radio?


Got guns?

Lord Valve
American - so far

On 11/11/11 08:42 , Lord Valve wrote:

If you are paranoid, you an even find stores in many places where you can buy
a refurbished radio for cash and leave a fake name and address.

Huh?

Where are you posting from? Why would anyone need to
leave his name and address - fake or otherwise - when
purchasing a radio?


Because cash transactions are coming under the scrutiny of
authority, today. Louisiana just became the most recent state to
require identity of purchaser in a cash transaction or a ban on the
cash transaction. Even a used purchase from a flea market or a
garage sale.

Other states are currently debating this provision.

On 11/11/11 24:15 , wrote:
On Nov 11, 12:04 am, David
wrote:
My guess is that the cost you would have to charge to recoup the time
and effort you put together in coming up with such a design would end
up making such a set *much* more expensive than just going to a ham
fest, buying a Hammarlund in good shape, and fixing it up. Or even
paying someone else to fix it up.

I already have a R-390, two Hammarlunds and a Racal....I wanted to
manufacture something. Or at least think about it.



Certainly worth thinking about.


Maybe worth doing. But consider:


Tubes are getting harder to come buy. Not that they can't be had.
And after an EMP, they're likely to be as available as working SS
devices. But there are inherent issues with Tubes. One is that they
use a LOT of precious energy, that in a survival mode situation is
best conserved for other applications, or longer listening. Another
is that voltages are much higher than those that can be recovered
after or during a crisis with ease. Low voltage, low current devices
are going to be more desirable when energy is in short supply.

But, more importantly, tube receivers aren't necessarily less
prone to damage by EMP than SS receivers. In fact, there is
empirical evidence to suggest that SS receivers can be made to
survive an EMP where a tube receiver will not.

Your best options, then, would include building a reasonably high
performance receiver with readily available common parts, and take
measures, such as a Faraday cage, and effective grounding/input
protection measures, to render your station if not immune, then more
resistant to stray or induced hostile voltages.

Now, you have a practical, and manufacturable, product.