HOMEBREW HAM RADIO FOR SALE by Don Merz, N3RHT. If you are interested in purchasing this radio for $125 or if you would like a detailed set of photos e-mailed to you, please send an e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Background: This radio was built by W3QVC who is now a silent key. I purchased it from another ham who hauled it away at the request of the ham's survivors but who had no interest in it. My intent was to get the radio back on the air. But it is apparent that I am never going to get around to it. The asking price is what I paid for the radio. I am located in Pittsburgh, PA. The radio could be shipped but it is so large that the shipping cost is likely to exceed the purchase price. So please keep that in mind. General: The radio is a sideband and CW rig designed to cover 10 through 80 meters less the WARC bands. It is a unique design that must have been built during the 1950's. The set shows careful engineering and solid building practices. This is no hack job. It consists of six 8.75 inch tall, black wrinkle 19" wide panels mounted in a double-wide home-made wooden rack. The power supply is separate and occupies another 10.5 inches of rack space. Also separate is a small VHF transmitter that is 7 inches high. The one power supply powers all components via a cable set that did not come with the rig. So that is one of the challenges here. The rig goes only about 12 inches deep. So it is thin except for the power supply which is about 18 inches deep. Since there are no power supply components on the chassis, each component is light. But the power supply itself weighs about 80 pounds. The unique part of the QVC design is that the whole thing seems to have been designed to share circuitry and work like a transceiver. So the same SSB filters and gain circuits are shared by both the oscillator and the receiver. The sections of the rig plug together to facilitate this interaction. I have some of these inter-connection cables but not all of them. As you look at the double-wide rack, the Oscillator/Mixer/Filter deck is in the upper left, the IF deck is middle left and the transmitter oscillator tank is on the lower left. At top right is the linear amplifier. Middle right is the receiver and the bottom right is unknown-it looks like an NBFM modulator and power supply but I can't be sure. Each unit of the set is described below. Transmitter-oscillator tank: This is on the lower left. This is just an R/C circuit in a sealed metal box. It plugs into the oscillator/mixer/filter deck on the top left. The OMF deck has 2 complex R/C filters and uses 2 7360 tubes as "mixers" plus 6 other tubes. It uses plug-in coils to change bands and the 40 meter set is installed. I have no other plug-in coils for the rig. The OMF deck is plugged directly into the linear amplifier. This amp uses 4 1625 tubes in what looks like a grounded grid configuration. The only other tube in the linear is a 6AH6 which is apparently used as an electronic T/R switch. In the middle left section is the AF/IF deck with the S-meter and ALC meter on it. This deck has the CW-LSB-USB mode switch on it along with all the gain controls for AF, IF and microphone. This deck has all the IF transformers on it and uses 2 7360 tubes plus 11 other tubes. The W3QVC receiver sits in the middle right panel. It's dial is calibrated for 160 through 2 meters, though 6 meters has been left out. The receiver is designed to ue 3 plug-in coils. Only one of these for 20 meters is in place. No other coils are present. The receiver uses 10 tubes in an odd combination of octal, loktal and miniature. It also uses 3 IF cans from an ARC-5 command set. Finally, the panel in the lower right has 2 sub-chassis mounted to it. These are missing some of their tubes and look like they have been modified a few times over the years. One of these is a power supply. The other is unknown, though it might be an NBFM adapter of some sort. That's it. I have been over the rig pretty thoroughly and have some semi-detailed notes to go with it. Otherwise, there is no documentation so the restorer is pretty much on their own. The entire rig is FOR SALE AS-IS for $125. I can dismantle it for shipping but it will end up in 5 or 6 cartons with a total eight of about 175 pounds. So pick-up would be best (in Pittsburgh, PA. This rig will be at the 2/23 WASHfest her in Pittsburgh looking for a buyer unless someone here wants it. Thanks. 73, Don Merz, N3RHT __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day http://shopping.yahoo.com
