[Hammarlund] re:dumb tuning

[Mike Taylor]

what a lively place this has been the last few days! about mike mcoy's
question on signal generators...i have two of them; one is a heath and the
other a knightkit. both are from the 1960's era. i don't use them for dial
tracking adjustments because they are inaccurate and unstable. also, they
don't cover the 60khz first i.f. frequency for i.f alignment. (not a problem
with my hq-110). for 455khz i.f., i just zereo beat the generator's second
harmonic against a broadcast station on 910khz and then proceed according to
the instructions in the owner's manual. for this proceedure and doing the
antenna and r.f. adjustments, these types of generators will do fine. my
generators are very inaccurate on vhf so for the hq-110 six meter band, i
used my radioshack programmable scanner to find 50 and 54mhz on the
generator. as for the post yesterday about the woman with the motorized jig
to align sp-600's, hammarlund called that the sweep frequency method and
said it's imperative to do the i.f. that way. however, i've seen a number of
posts here saying the normal generator procedure is fine and i've found that
to be the case myself. as for outboard digital frequency displays, i
remember reading somewhere that these things are only as accurate as the
oscillator tracking of the radio. i'd like to know some more about that.
there are so many tricks that we learn to do what we need to and have fun.
bottom line, mike, is that if you're on a budget (i am) one of those old
heath, knightkit or eico signal generators can be had for a song and having
one is certainly better than having nothing at all. ebay is a good place to
look and there's also a website called "the knightkit page". some good stuff
for sale there plus a free discussion billboard just like hammarlund digest.
there's been a lot of good info on the digest the last few days and i've
learned a few things. thanks to all who keep chiming in. at the end of the
day, we all hopefully have our hammarlunds working top notch. oh, one more
trick...if your tuing is off above 20mhz, go to 27mhz and use a cb radio to
find where the main tuning dial should be (use the bandspread to find the cb
signal). the crystal calibrator will guide you from there. 73's...mike
taylor...reel2reel@hotmail.com