[Boatanchors] PROVIDENCE RI ESTATE SALE JULY 3RD

[Tom B]

Hello Doug,

It sounds like you have some experience with these.   If you are 
interested, there is a very long discussion about the RA17 restoration 
happening on the Wireless Set 19 list.  See 
https://groups.io/g/wireless-set-no19/

Tom Bryan
N3AJA

On 6/26/2021 7:24 AM, McDonald, J Douglas wrote:
> I can't say what the unknown is,  but a good Racal is worth the trouble.
> Lots of trouble ... even the US destined version is full of horribly unreliable British parts, including about half of the mica caps.
>
> And those caps are in multistage filters that are a nightmare to tune once
> all the caps are replaced.
>
> But once working they are in most ways as good as an R390A.
> And in one way better:  for your wrist. The bad news is that while they have separate AGC and detector, the AGC is unstable. That is, its gain starts falling off at 12 dB/octave at levels where the gain is greater than one for fast changes. (The  response of the RF stage is grossly too slow and it easily saturates.)  If you modify it to get almost all the filtering into just one cap then it works great even on SSB. It must have been designed ONLY for AM and RTTY or VERY fast CW. Even novice grade CW discombobulates it.
>
> Doug McDonald