[Hammarlund] Finished the HQ-180A (for now anyway)

[Bob Young]

I cannot believe how many different methods there are in print to align these things. I used a combination of the early 180 manual which believe it or not I found the most useful except that the alignment diagram was very confusing, I used the HQ-180 Series of Receivers which Les sent to keep the instructions straight. I redid the 60 KHz IF twice and the 3035 IF three times. I thought I had the 60 KHz strip done well the first time but redid it again just in case. When I followed the later manuals which just say to inject 3035 KHz for the second (?) IF it did not work well for mine. I ended up using 3035.50 which is where I believe the crystal was cut to or drifted to, the early manual says to set the generator to where the crystal rings which I did do. With a straight 3035 my receiver sounded good but was kind of dead, it's much hotter with the 3035 IF moved up to 3035.50. All the bands are pretty much right on including the two BCB's.
I do have a couple of problems still though, I still can't get the antenna to peak on the two middle bands at the high end but they are still hot and I'm getting some frequency shift when switching selectivities. I can live with the two bands not peaking as they're much improved but want to find out why I'm getting frequency shift when changing selectivity, I have to retune a little bit.
I did get a good loud het last night on 1467 but lost it before I got any significant audio, I suspect it was one of the Netherlands' stations. I spent a lot of time today on the 2.05 to 4.0 band today and relearned a valuable lesson: make sure you use the correct peak as I got it all screwed up at one point but did gradually pull it back in. I bought some 6135 tubes to replace my microphonic 6C4 and also bought some 7036 tubes even though my 6BE6's are new, more advice from Les Locklear.
I also have a nice HQ-180 that I golden screwdrivered years ago so I think I'll grab that out of storage and do that one next while it's still fresh. This is one of the hardest radios to align I've ever had, R-390A's and National HRO's are a piece of cake compared to these. Thanks everyone for your help,

Bob
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