[Hammarlund] HQ-180 coil winding success

[Robert Sauvan]

Hi all,
Thought I would let everyone know my effort at rewinding the T-15 coil 
for my HQ-180 turned out to be quite successful. After many hours of 
contemplating what kind of wire, will this work, or will that work, with 
numerous ideas and suggestions from all of you, I ended up going to a 
place in Boulder CO called JB Saunders which has a lot of old stock 
parts and pieces in hopes of finding some Litz wire. No luck with the 
Litz, but then I thought why not look for an old inductor that has 
windings? I found one that had windings with wire that was almost 
identical to the size on my coil as best as I could tell by looking at 
it. This inductor has enough windings on it that you could probably wind 
about thousand HQ-180 coils. The biggest difficulty was to count the 
windings that I needed. I ended up having to take pictures of the coil 
and then blowing them up on my computer. That worked quite well. Amazing 
what a high resolution photo will show you. I also did the same thing 
after I rewound the coil to be sure I had the correct number of 
windings. If anyone needs to know it is 34 turns. Soldered the thing 
back up and voila, nice sigs on the 40 meter band again. I will need to 
tune the coil and actually want to do a complete alignment before 
putting the radio back in service but so far we have good volume and it 
seems to be working quite well. I will post pictures on my website in 
the next week or so and show the before and after of the small project 
with big results. Want to thank everyone once again for all of the 
suggestions and help figuring out what to do to get this thing fixed. I 
have been trying to find a replacement for months with no luck. Now if 
it ever happens again, I will just jump in and give it a shot.

Thanks again
73-Bob-W0YBS