Jim Gerke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> made an utterance to the drakelist gang
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I did the same thing with crystals in the FT-243 holders when I was a
Novice in the early sixties. I used toothpaste as the abrasive for
moving them up in frequency. To go lower, I'd mark a corner with a lead
pencil. That made 'em a little heavier and they'd go lower in frequency.
The crystals used by the Drake rigs are in all metal holders with the
top part of the can soldered to the base. It's tough to get them open
without damaging the quartz.
73, Jim K5JG
Terrell Hamilton wrote:
Hi, Eddy –
Do you think you could “sand down” the frequency on a
crystal close to the one you want? I don’t know what kind of crystals
are in your receivers, or even +how it would work for receivers, but it
worked for me for transmitting on my old homebrew rig.
Way back in the day(late 50’s), when I was a teenage novice with not
much money, I remember sanding down crystals that were given to me by
other hams. It worked pretty good and gave me different frequencies to
use on my crystal controlled 6146 xmtr.
The crystals had to be the kind that are in a plastic case that opens up
and It only worked one way, of course – can’t add material to them,
unfortunately – and I forget if sanding them made freqs go up or down –
it seems to me that it would make the freq higher the more you sand, but
that’s just an educated (?) guess. I remember opening up the little
plastic case, sanding them down, putting them back in the case and then
transmitting and monitoring to see what new frequency they were.
Sometimes I broke them, or went too far out of the novice band, but
eventually I had a few crystals that I could switch out if the band got
crowded on my single frequency xmtr.
It was kind of tedious, but it gave me a pretty good “poor man’s VFO”…
If you’ve got lots of crystals that you don’t mind experimenting with,
it might be a possibility that could work.
What do you think, folks? Rcvr crystals are probably different, don’t
open up, and there’s probably some technical reason that makes this a
ridiculous suggestion…
Terry
K7WLD
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