K4KYV has an original lower skirt for you that covers
the air intake filter. My brother has one of these and
Don also saved the vertical meter cover that I plan to
get from him someday.
I have it, but it was full of mouse nests and the urine had caused it rust
severely. With all those little holes it will be a heck of a job to get it
de-rusted, so I'm saving it for later in the year. Plus it sticks out in a
significant way and with the rig elevated on the dollies I would be bumping
my shins
into it...
I think that lower skirt that covers the air intake is the most ridiculous
looking thing I ever saw on a piece of equipment. I have considered
modifying mine so that it is flat instead of bulging out. Besides looking
so silly, it's in the way and makes the transmitter take more footprint
space than necessary. The only thing that has kept me from modifying it is
the metal work involved.
I run my fans at half voltage to quieten them down. At full speed they
sound like a vacuum cleaner running. Too loud for the shack near the
operating position. I have a switch for turning them off completely if I
wish. Same goes for the a.c. contactor relays. They sound like a chainsaw.
I modified the circuit and got mine to run off DC. Now they're perfectly
quiet. The stock mod reactor in mine talked back badly, so I replaced it
with a potted unit I happened to have on hand.
I converted the xtal oscillator to a buffer stage for the external vfo. One
of the xtal frequency adjusting capacitors was removed, and in the hole I
placed a larger variable that resonates the slug tuned coil. Now I can
change frequency without having to remove the top of the oscillator unit and
fiddle with the slug. Simply a tuning knob on the front panel.
I replaced the bakelite grid coil with an air core inductor (B&W Miniductor)
of similar physical size, and optimum inductance for 160. With the stock
coil, even on the original broadcast frequency I could never get more than
105 or 110 mills of grid current to the final. With the new coil I can now
get 150 mills with no plate voltage. With full plate voltage the grid
current drops to about 125 mills.
Paul, I'm still using the side panel for the meters. If I ever decide to
get rid of it and make a new meter panel that doesn't stick out from the
cabinet, I'll let you know. Again, a lot of metal work involved - and I
hate doing metal work.
Mine didn't come with a built-in dummy load, or else someone removed it
years ago. No signs of impressions in the metal cabinet from removed
hardware. But I have an external dummy load that is of similar rating as
the original Gates. In its place I have some dropping resistors to lower
the rf plate voltage while keeping full modulator plate voltage. This
allows extended positive peaks. The stock transmitter doesn't make much
above 100% before flat-topping.
I used car polish on mine. The cabinet had evidently been under a leaky
roof at one time, and the paint was chaulky. The wax brought it back to
life. It has some serious scratches down to bare metal, where it was
scooted across a concrete floor on its side. I may try to touch it up some
day.
I mounted my modulation transformer on ceramic standoffs, and installed
spark gaps across the secondary. I have heard of too many of these blowing
up. Mine came with a spare mod reactor and xfmr. The xfmr was shorted out.
Evidently the station obtained a replacement xfmr/reactor set, but the old
reactor was still good.
The original MV rectifiers are replaced with plug-in solid state modules
that drop in like a new tube. I removed the filament xfmr for the high
voltage rectifiers to make room when I shuffled the reactors around and
relaced the stock talkative mod reactor.
Mine has also been modified to run CW. Probably one of the few, if not the
only, broadcast transmitter presently on 160 that runs CW.
The transmitter works great, but it has to be the ugliest broadcast
transmitter ever made. It looks more like a soda machine than a
transmitter. I prefer the old art deco style, or the 1030's black wrinkle
look.
Mine works only on 160. Have never attempted to make it multi-band or to
convert it to 75 or 40.
I'll try to take some pictures of mine and post them on the web for viewing.
Don k4kyv
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