[HBR] Breck's HBR-14 coil info

[William Hopkins]

Breck, 

Thank you for this very useful work-up of your coil construction practices. Bill Fizette was quite right about its usefulness. 

As I read and saw your presentation, I thought of my recent experiences when I built the Lindsay-type 80 meter superhet, with its larger-than-life solenoids for the IF's and BFO. That work required me to build a coil winding machine - all quite primitive - to get the wire snug up against the next winding. 

You mentioned the work involved in winding while standing on one's head. Why not make use of that coil-winding setup? I think a PVC or commercially produced coil form could be snugly mounted to permit quite good windings for an HBR. (You can see a photo of that coil winder at my QRZ-dot-com webpage / just scroll down on callsign AA2YV.) 

I found the same trickiness at work as I began to search for the right tap point for the Local Oscillator. "Lindsay" suggested to place it at 50%, which means that "zero point 5" (0.5) squared should make the tuning oscillator reduce down to 25% of its total capacitance available. Well, that didn't work. (Stray capacitance in the mix?) My variable tuned the entire 80 meter band when the variable was still half meshed. By moving down from 10 turns up to about 7 turns up I got the tuning up to 3.825. Going back up one turn gave me bandspread to just above 3.900. I'm still working on it. 

So, when I try your method of the quarter inch holes to achieve various taps (I'm looking at your photos), how do you tap in differently? Do you unsolder and then push (i.e., "inch") the turn downwards or upwards, to make the next turn appear at the hole? Does the large gap created by the diagonal wire at the hole reduce the Q to any serious extent? 

Thanks for the bandwidth. 

73's Bill AA2YV 
Rochester NY