[drakelist] Drake 2-C and stingy s-meter

[Tom Taylor]

My 2-C receiver became deaf after a couple of months of not turning it on. I took the covers off and carefully deoxit'd the bandswitch and other wafers. That didn't have any effect. Then I wiggled each tube and found a culprit. I deoxit'd the tube sockets and that did the trick. I've never aligned this receiver and so I went through the alignment procedure in the manual. The 50 khz (or kc, as the manual says) and the 455 kc xfmrs needed slight tweaking to bring them exactly on frequency. The last step is calibrating the s-meter. At - 1.35v, the meter is set to S1. Then backing off the RF gain to -13v, the meter is checked for S9+40. With the RF gain turned all the way down, I could only read about -11.5v. In any case, the S meter read close to S9+40 and I called it good.

The receiver receives well, but the S-meter is extremely stingy. A very loud SW broadcast station may only read S5.

Any ideas or suggestions what's wrong that my cause the meter to be so unresponsive?

Thanks,
Tom n7tm