[AMRadio] Heathkit recall story

[Gary Schafer]

Hi Charlie,

Funny that the article says that the HW2026 "met spec" but was still
recalled.

I happened upon a large number of the recalled 2026 boards in early 1980's.
I first found the receiver boards, I think, in the Milwaukee Wisconsin
Heathkit store. I did some digging and found that Heath had split up the
recalled kits and sent different boards to each time zone. I think it was
the Eastern zone stores got the transmitter boards, Central zone got the
receivers, Mountain zone got the synthesizers and the West coast got the
amplifiers from the recalled radios.

I thought that I could make something useful out of the boards and bought
all that I could find by calling the Heathkit stores across the country. I
ended up with several hundred of each of the boards.
I put together a couple of the radios and found that there was no way to
make a useable radio with what Heath had designed.

The synthesizer scheme was all wrong. They divided the synthesizer signals
down and mixed it with a 1 MHz signal as I remember. It had mixing products
all over the place on both transmit and receive. The products were too close
together to filter out at the frequencies they were operated at.
I don't recall what their original spec was but it was unusable.
Just looking at the mixing scheme tells you it would be full of trash.
They did it right on the HW 2036 replacement.

I have used some of the receiver boards for projects and they worked pretty
well with an external crystal oscillator for injection.
Those boards were complete receivers with audio amp and squelch.

The other boards are useful too.

I obtained most boards that were completely built and some where all the
parts and bare board were still in the package never built.

I still have lots of the built and unbuilt boards left if anyone is
interested. There were several dual gate FETs that were similar to the
famous 40673 dual gate fet.

The receiver in the 2036 was almost identical to the 2026.

73
Gary  K4FMX

> -----Original Message-----
> From: amradio-bounces at mailman.qth.net [mailto:amradio-
> bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of CL in NC via AMRadio
> Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 1:25 PM
> To: amradio at mailman.qth.net
> Subject: [AMRadio] Heathkit recall story
> 
> Some of you might find this interesting.  The HW2026 changed into the
> 2036 and here is the reason:
> 
> https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/tales-from-the-
> cube/4460335/Heathkit-transceiver-recalled-after-meeting-specs-
> 
> I have a HW 2036, and finding the complete manual for it was difficult,
> but eventually found the whole thing and got it back on the air.
> 
> Charlie, W4MEC in NC
> ______________________________________________________________
> Our Main Website: http://www.amfone.net
> AMRadio mailing list
> Archives: http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/amradio/
> List Rules (must read!): http://w5ami.net/amradiofaq.html
> List Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/amradio
> Post: AMRadio at mailman.qth.net
> To unsubscribe, send an email to amradio-request at mailman.qth.net with
> the word unsubscribe in the message body.
> 
> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
> Message delivered to garyschafer at largeriver.net