[Boatanchors] vacuum tube radio kits

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 8:51 AM,  <Troglodite at aol.com> wrote:

> Several years ago a club in the South attempted to market a copy of the
> (in)famous Ameco Novice transmitter. They were sincere and did a good job on
> design and fabrication, but they gave up after a few months and probably
> ended  up eating a lot of hard tooled chassis and parts. I don't really know,
> but they  didn't succeed. The Ameco was about as bare bones as you could get,
> but was  complete on one chassis including an AC power supply.

IIRC, wasn't there some issue with a copyright infringement or
something involved with this? Someone had bought the rights to the
AMECO name or such and threatened to pursue legal action, or something
like that. It's something I heard, so it could be total BS, of course.
(o:

There were a couple AMers in the northeast back in the 90s who
produced a simple rig built on a flipped over cake pan for a chassis.
One of the fellows was Carl WA1EYE whose call no longer shows up on
QRZ. I think the other may have been Rich, K1ETP. They sold a bunch of
these kits, just add cake pan. Here's one of Rich's transmitters:

http://www.amwindow.org/pix/htm/k1etppwp.htm

I think the kit version was CW only and crystal controlled, but some
guys added a modulator and used them as QRP AM rigs. I remember they
even had a net one afternoon or early evening of the week before 75m
got noisy.

Getting some of the parts reliably would be the issue, as well as long
term sales. Sort of a Catch-22: you'd need to buy in large enough
quantity to get things like transformers and filter or tuning caps
produced, but you'd need to be able to sell enough of them to make the
procurement worthwhile. There are a number of things like twist-lok
type caps available through AES, so being able to build the design
around existing parts would be a plus.

Tubes shouldn't be an issue. Between the millions of excess gov't JAN
stock and new tubes made overseas, it should be easy enough to secure
these.

Sheet metal would be the tricky part - easy enough to get made, but
time consuming and labor-intensive. The cake pan guys got around this
by using an existing source. Not terribly pretty, but very functional.

Probably the biggest issue for many though, in today's lawsuit-happy
society, is producing a kit with the ability to kill someone. Stupid
user or not, it would likely be an ambulance chaser's dream. Even
electric hair dryers which are all but completely sealed have tags
warning not to use them in the shower, for those who go out of their
way to be stupid. This assumes they can read, of course.

~ Todd,  KA1KAQ/4