"Mark Keith" wrote in message
om...
-

A friend of mine used one of those as his first receiver. This was
back when we were in jr.hi school...We built homebrew 6v6 transmitters
to yik yak on 40m cw. I used to go over and operate on his setup
sometimes...The S-38 had an annoying quirk when working CW...If you
hit the table with your knee, the radio suddenly jumped off down the
band, never to return unless you got lucky... Not the most stable
thing I've ever seen...Many times we would start working people, but
hit the table, and never find them again....

That was probably caused by those goofy cut plates on the bandspread part of
the tuning capacitor. The plates have the profile of the linear frequency
type used on the some of the old TRFs. I have no idea why they used such an
unbalanced plate design for the radio's bandspread. It doesn't even work as
a linear type with all the capacitance of the main tuning cap in parallel.
The tuning rate gets faster as the bandspread cap is closed.


He finally upgraded to
a halliscratchers sx-40, which was fairly decent in comparion. I've
got an old National receiver which is very similar to a S-38 in basic
design and coverage.
But I've never plugged it in to see if it works, even though it's been
sitting here for years...I just keep it around as a decorative room
object. :/
MK

Probably real easy to recap! Not much else goes wrong with these type of
radios.

Frank Dresser