[Hammarlund] HQ-180 sounding right?

[Robert Sauvan]

Hi all,
I have been working on my HQ-180 over the last couple of weeks. I did an 
alignment on it and it seems to be working and tracking frequencies just 
fine. But, I am questioning somewhat if it is really working right. When 
I tune in CW I am finding what I feel is quite a bit of distortion on CW 
signals unless I turn the RF gain almost, if not, all the way down. I 
can play with the BFO and vernier tuning and get the tones a bit better 
as well, but when I do, I just dont feel I have the correct tone that I 
like to listen to. Im wondering if a filter of some sort is not working 
correctly or something like that. Lots of signals seem to be extremely 
loud as well. Most would probably say, thats great, but Im not sure it 
is really the way it is supposed to be.They almost sound as if they are 
overloading the receiver. I have a dozen 6C4 tubes that I have swapped 
over and over. These dont seem to be an item I think to be an issue. I 
have swapped a couple of 12AU7 tubes in the product detector and I have 
found one to be terrible and make things worse but I only have 3 
altogether and 2 are in the radio. One in the product detector and one 
in the bfo meter position. Possibly the 2 I have in the radio are not 
that great either but wouldnt know unless I had some replacements to 
try. Could I have a problem in my product detector? I would love to hear 
if I am expecting something that I dont need to cure or maybe have an 
idea what could be wrong if there is an issue. Any advice would be 
greatly appreciated.

Thanks-Bob-W0YBS