[AMRadio] Wanted: Receiver - New England

[Rodger Hough]

There are a couple of Hammarlund receivers, the HQ-100 General  
Coverage and the Hammarlund HQ-110 that provide pretty good AM  
performance on the lower bands. They sound pretty good as is into a  
decent, efficient speaker and with the modifications included in this  
article (costing all of about 2 bucks), they sound even better. I  
have both receivers and am amazed at the nice sounds I receive from  
the Florida AM Group.

http://www.amwindow.org/tech/htm/hqaudiomods.htm

The good news is, these receivers can often be found for less than  
half of your proposed budget.

Rodger
K1HH


On Feb 17, 2008, at 7:58 PM, JT Croteau wrote:

> I want to thank everyone who has responded so far, both on and off
> list, to this thread.  Brett, N2DTS, said, a couple posts posts back,
> that I need to take a better inventory of my priorities so let me try
> and clarify what they are to me.
>
>> From what I've read, there are two categories of receivers;
> "Battle-Fields" and Hi-Fidelity and it is very difficult to have your
> cake and eat it to.  Unfortunately, I am trying to have a mixture of
> both but leaning more towards Hi-Fi because it is the pure love of the
> sound of AM that is driving me to setup this AM station.
>
> I am learning that there is no perfect receiver and it is very hard
> for a newbie like me to pick one.  I wish I had the luxury to afford
> to buy several different ones like some people but I can only afford
> one receiver at the moment   A big problem for newbies is the fact
> that EVERYONE has differing opinions for each model and it's often
> hard to get two people to totally agree on the same model.  For
> example, I'll ask for opinions on an ABC-123 and one person will
> reply, "oh yeah, it's awesome on AM" while another will say "stay
> away, it's only good for slopbucket signals".  If I could afford
> multiple purchases, it'd be much easier to take a gamble and
> experiment but I can't so it's very difficult to choose from just
> looking at specs and "opinions".
>
> With this said:
>
>    AM 75M and 40M coverage is my primary interest at this time, I will
> NEVER be using the radio to tune in slopbucket nor CWer.  SWL and 160M
> coverage would be nice as well but it will be a couple years before I
> have space for a 160M antenna.
>
>    Hi-Fidelity is near the top of my must haves but not if it's
> results in a huge hit on receiver performance.  However, I definitely
> don't want bottom of the barrel communications grade audio.  I've been
> in some shacks where the audio fills the room and you can feel the
> audio down to your bones.  I want to achieve this or as close as I can
> get within my budget.
>
>     Looks, style, size, and weight don't really matter as it's what's
> inside the box that counts to me.  Ideally the smaller the better and
> if it fits in a standard 19" rack, all the better as I have plenty of
> rack space.
>
>     Budget - Yeah, this will always be an issue for me.  But I can
> realistically afford to spend a max. of $400 on a receiver so I may
> not be able to get super Hi-Fi with this budget but I would think that
> I should be able to still find something with very good fidelity.   If
> I had the money to go all out, I'm the type of person who definitely
> would so I am not trying to cheap out on this.  But I do want to get
> something now rather than save an wait.. patience and me have never
> gotten along.
>
> Since my first post a couple days ago, I've been reading a bit about
> Hallicrafters SX-17's and SX-42's with their push-pull 6V6's and how
> they can really make some very nice audio - a couple people seem to
> really like these.  However, for some reason, these two rigs don't
> seem to be mentioned much.. are they genuine "sleepers" in this case?
> The SX-17 appears to have good sensitivity and good selectivity with
> an IF bandwidth switch actually works.  I think I read that the narrow
> position is somewhere around 4-5 kc and the wide is somewhere around
> 10-12 kc.
>
> Has anything I've said made sense and may point me to more specific
> models of receivers I should be looking at?
>
> Thanks again.
>
> -- 
> JT Croteau, N1ESE - Manchester, NH (FN42gx)
> Contest Manager, TARA Skirmish
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I recommend Macs to my friends, and PCs to those I don't mind  
charging by the hour.