[HBR] Cost Of Homebrewing?

[hbr@mailman.qth.net]

A few more thoughts....

Looking back through the ARRL Handbooks, it seems to me that about 1960 or so the focus of the construction projects changed.

Before that time, many of the projects were aimed at the "general purpose amateur application". For example, a bandwitching transmitter would be described that would do AM and CW. Or a 500 watt GG amplifier for SSB. 

IOW, many of the projects were direct competition for commercially available products.

But somewhere in the early '60s the focus started to move towards 'niche' projects. Looking at the receivers in my '67 Handbook, I see:

- a bandswitched solidstate regen set
- a tunable 80/40 converter from QST, several years earlier
- a regenerative preselector from QST
- a 20/15/10 xtal controlled converter
- the Junior Miser's Dream rx
- the HB-67

None of these is a general-purpose receiver - nor do any of them have competing manufactured or kit products.

The last truly general-purpose tube HBR I recall from ARRL Hq was the DCS-500. Its front end is obviously of HBR lineage, but it also had a number of really good features such as the roofing-filtered first IF at around 4.5 MHz (excellent image rejection and the upper bands have somewhat-lower freq. LOs), three bandwidths in the second IF (500 Hz CW, ~2 kHz SSB, 6 kHz AM), nice big open chassis layout with not much complex metalwork, not trick circuits, no expensive unobtanium parts. Quite practical for exact replication without lots of tools or test equipment.

Of course the dial was only so-so, no bandswitching, and the choice of tubes completely unimaginative. But except for the bandswitching, that was all easily fixed by the imaginative ham, either during initial construction or as a modification. 

But after the DCS-500 (which originally appeared in QST about 1960 - not much.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the RSGB books were full of stuff that was "general purpose". Heck, the 3rd edition has a complete bandswitched hybrid SSB transceiver!

Perhaps the explanation is simply economic - the cost of manufactured or kit gear in the UK may have been so high that homebrewing a G2DAF rx from new parts was about the same cost as a much-inferior imported kit or manufactured rx. 

Which would you rather build for the same price - an SB-300 or a G2DAF? 

Would be interesting to know what it would have cost to build a G2DAF in the UK back in those times - and in the USA!

73 de Jim, N2EY