[ARC5] Another hack job...

[Kenneth G. Gordon]

I chose a BC-454 3-6 MHz receiver from the stack here to refurbish and get 
operating, as I wanted to do some experimentation on it.

There was a masking-tape "label" stuck to the RF/Mixer coil box. In red ink, it 
said something like "Mod...." and "28...".

There wasn't enough of it left to read.

So, I began the refurbishment. Everything seemed to be there. All the can 
caps, with the single unusual exception of the triple 0.22 MFD job, had 
shorted sections, so I replaced all of them with very small 0.047 MFD 400 
VDC jobs.

There was something "funny" about the shield that is over the tuning 
capacitor, so I yanked it to take a look.

All but one of the rotor plates in each section had been yanked. The antenna 
connector had been replaced with a ceramic RCA jack, and a piece of white 
coax had been run from that down to the two connectors at the RF input.

I then removed the coil box and opened it up to take a look. Lo and behold, 
all the coils had been replaced with many fewer turns of larger enameled 
wire.

So, this particular receiver had been hacked to receive 28 to 
God-alone-knows-where MHz. Probably the entire 10 meter band.

Also, the filaments had been rewired for 12 V in a very haphazard manner. It 
took me some time to restore that to 24 V. Thankfully, the original hacker 
had left unattached wires of the original wiring in place. 

The audio transformer had been removed, and the +HV had been wired 
directly to the audio output tube in some strange way that I have seen 
before, but have never "reverse engineered" to see exactly what was done.

In any case, I installed a 5631 transformer taken from an even worse-hacked 
BC-453 and wired it correctly.

Testing later today just to see if it was worth all the effort. Somehow, I doubt 
if it was.

Ken W7EKB

Kenneth G. Gordon W7EKB

"Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway."--- John   Wayne