[Boatanchors] A short Vent

[Rodger Singley]

The only case I can remember really being bothered by excessive drift was when I still lived in Mississippi and a friend asked me to meet him on 15 meters to test his newly acquired Hallicrafters HT-37. We both had extra tickets and met in the lower part of the "advanced" portion of the 15 meter phone sub-band.  He had sprayed some sort of cleaner on the HT-37 VFO capacitor which of course had a different dielectric constant than air and as the set warmed up and the cleaner evaporated he was moving up in frequency several kilohertz per minute.  By the end of his fairly long test transmission he was about to the point of creating QRM to the SW broadcast stations above 21.450 and I had already called his house so his wife could tell him to QRT before the FCC took notice :)

After the cleaner was gone the HT-37 was fine.

I realized how out of touch I was 5 or 6 years ago when an old timer brought to the December club meeting a really nicely crafted miniature code key sold as a Christmas ornament in England.  Several members had no idea what the ornament represented.  

When I first started operating as one of the net control operators for the regional vintage AM net on 3885 I kept a Grundig YB-400 shortwave portable at the operating position and corrected my VFO every couple of minutes to stay zero beat on 3885.  Later I acquired 3885 crystals for my Viking 500 and the Ranger used to drive my Desk KW and then there was one less thing to worry about as net control.  The Johnson VFOs in those rigs are pretty stable and even without correction the drift was well under 1 Khz. for a 90 minute net session but I felt as net control I should stay exactly on frequency.  Drifting stations on the net never created a problem for me but I generally use receivers that provide selectable sideband on AM to combat QRM from above or below the net frequency and sometimes I would miss a station using a modern rig that only transmits one sideband on AM when it was opposite from the sideband I had selected for receive.  

Bottom line is there are plenty of interesting people to communicate with and if someone's world revolves around frequency accuracy and stability I probably wouldn't care to spend much time in conversation.  It reminds me of the old advertisement one of the phonograph cartridge companies used to run about the professor who never listened to his albums but instead watched them on an oscilloscope looking for any distortion.

Rodger WQ9E