[ARC5] Way OT -- SX-28

[Jim Haynes]

My uncle W5FRX owned one of those receivers.  On the rare occasions when
I got to visit him I was enchanted to be able to turn all those knobs
and see what they did.  Of course back then all the amateur phone 
operation was AM and there was a lot of AM shortwave on the air, so there
was plenty to listen to.  (And even AM BC band was worth listening to in
those long ago days.)

My uncle also had a home built transmitter that I was quite impressed
by.  I was too young to appreciate all its features, but I think he used
bandpass couplers between stages so that it wasn't necessary to tune
each stage.  I remember he spent many hours on the work bench running
the VFO from one end of a band to the other while measuring something.

Well in his old age and after a heart attack he gave up ham radio and
had the gear all hauled away.  He did say something once about maybe
he should get some modern gear like a Yaesu, but I guess he never acted
on it.  I sure wish he had offered his stuff to me, not because I needed
it but because it would have made wonderful keepsakes.

A few years ago I decided I'd like to have an SX-28 for myself, as sort
of a reminder of those golden days of yore.  I bought one on ebay, don't
remember how much I paid for it.  It had been recapped once, but the
replacement caps were about as bad as the originals so I recapped it 
again.  One of the IF transformers was bad, and by incredible luck there
was somebody on ebay offering the exact transformers, so I was able
to get a replacement.  Also it was a rack mount receiver, or at least
without the case.  Another piece of incredible luck was that at a
hamfest one of my friends encountered someone selling a couple of SX-28s,
one of which was pretty much a salvage unit but the case was in pretty
good shape and he gave it to me.  My friend took the other one and got
it working.

Well I haven't made much use of it, considering that I have too many
radios and that there is so little of an AM nature to listen to and
the modern gear is so much more compact and easy to operate.

Jim W6JVE

 	---

 	"Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
 	"No it ain't! No it ain't!  But ya gotta know the territory."
 		Meredith Willson, The Music Man