Hi Again Guys, Just a few happy concluding comments to my previous saga re. the intermittent "warbbling / scratchy" signal from my T-4X transmitter...
After having determined that the issue was, indeed, a cold solder joint on one of the leads of the 3000-pfd. s.m. oscillator tank capacitor to the circuit board deep inside the bowels(!) of the PTO (that took only 43 years to manifest itself into a problem here, too, BTW!), I conducted several days of off-the-air testing & monitoring here, with no traces of the previous malady... To-day I put the Twins on the air (40-meters), & made several CW QSOs, monitoring my on-the-air signal---SUCCESS! The note & tone coming out of that old T-4X is pure music to my ears. VALUABLE LESSONS LEARNED: (1) Have a LOT of respect for, but do NOT be intimidated by, the "dreaded" Drake PTO. It CAN be accessed, and it CAN be serviced, even by the likes of me (and YOU, too, I'm sure); (2) Solder joints CAN go bad---some just take a little more time than others to manifest themselves into a problem...and when they DO go sour, they can be in the most inaccessible of places (I think that's a corollary to Murphy's Law); and finally, (3) You've just GOTTA love this old Drake stuff: a bit of common sense & common test tools (heck, I used a bamboo CHOP STICK here to locate the "bad" part, for goodness' sake!) goes a L-O-N-G way. Try doing that with the microprocessors, ad nauseam, in to-day's hi-tech black-box "appliances." Happy "...Drake-ing" to all, & my vy ~73!~ de Eddy VE3CUI - VE3XZ _______________________________________________ Drakelist mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.zerobeat.net/mailman/listinfo/drakelist
