[ARC5] R-26 BFO injection adjustment

[Kenneth G. Gordon]

On 12 May 2017 at 13:37, J Mcvey via ARC5 wrote:

> Removing c45 gave me enough BFO that it can work pretty well with medium 
> -strong signals. No reason that I can see to disable the AGC. In fact I wish it 
> worked better than it does.

It can be made to do so, but that would take substantial modification of the receiver, and from 
what you have said in the past, I doubt that you would want to do that.
 
> Made contact with a SSB station 400 miles away last night amidst QRN, QRM 
> and poor propagation with my paltry 25 watts of AM.
> While these sets were designed before SSB existed, SSB can be demodulated 
> by an ARC-5 receiver with patience and a "light touch".

I have had very good luck when using my refurbished BC-454s to copy both CW and SSB. 
They sound very good. In fact, I exhibit this in a youtube video I posted a couple of years ago.

Also, I found many years ago that if you, as an AM station, very carefully zero-beated your 
AM carrier on an SSB station, they would never know you were on AM. I used the 
transmitters VFO, with the BFO in the receiver turned off, to do that. Then I turned the 
receiver's BFO back on.

> Even though it takes some patience to get an SSB station tuned in, it takes a lot 
> more patience to wait for an "AM station" to stop talking!
> I wanted to throw my call out to one last night, but I gave up after he talked 
> continuously for for 15 minutes without a break. I don't think he cared if anybody 
> was still listening! It seem that AM ops are "long play" talkers in general...jeesh!

That is called an "Old Buzzard" QSO. One of the main reasons for such, as Robert pointed 
out, was that it often took up to a minute to transfer from transmit to receive. The operator 
had to throw three switches, at a minimum, to go from TX to RX.

Another issue I always thought was weird was that there were almost NO transmitters in the 
100 watt class or even less which came with TR relays, yet every station needed such.

Thus Dow-Key sold many such relays. This fact was mentioned in the most recent issue of 
ER Mag.

Ken W7EKB

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus