[Boatanchors] Johnson-Viking 122 VFO Freq. Jump

[Bill Stewart]

For the past month or so I have been using the Viking 2/122 VFO quite a bit on 40 & 80 mtr. CW. For a key, I primarily use a J-44 (also by EFJ). Several weeks ago I noticed in my monitoring rx. that there was an occasional freq. jump of anywhere from a few cycles to a hundred or so. It only occurred on key closure....no jump while the carrier was on. I opened up the VFO and sprayed the band switch, cked tubes, tightened hardware, etc....it still had the jump. I did find the dropping res. at the vr tube to be out of tol. and replaced it...still had the jump. One night while listening to the jumping osc. in the rx., in a very small fit of frustration I mashed the key down sort of hard and moved it from side to side....noticing that the jump was occurring as I put pressure on the key and moved it around. Long story short, I found that there was anywhere from 1.6 ohms to over 700 ohms ( that's right, 700 ) across the key plug. This type of key uses a piece of flat spring steel for tension instead of the coiled spring like the J-38. This flat spring steel also acts as a connection between the top contact (part with the knob) and a terminal. The tension screw makes the connection between the top contact and the spring steel tensioner. I cleaned and polished the point of contact between the tension screw and spring but still had some occasional jump so I jumped around the the tension screw. So far, the problem has cleared up.

I thought this was an oddity that you guys might be interested in...it sure stumped me for a while...
73 de Bill K4JYS