[Heathkit] Heathkit SB Essay.

[Chris Codella, W2PA]

Just to add another two cents (what are we up to now?), I also have an 
SB-101 that I recently bought as a junker in awful shape.  I had planned 
to use it as a source of spare parts for my HW-100 that I built way back 
in 1970.  But instead, I completely disassembled it down to the chassis 
(except for the PC boards) and then cleaned and reassembled it by the 
manual.  What a blast that was!  It works beautifully.

As a teenager, I couldn't afford one back when it was originally sold - 
I built the HW-100.  So using this SB-101 on the air was a new 
experience for me.  My biggest surprise was how incredibly stable and 
well calibrated the SB-series LMO is!  After a brief warmup it hardly 
drifts at all (similar to my Drake B-line) and the calibration tracking 
across a 500kHz band is even better.  The mechanical parts cleaned up 
well and the main tuning is now very smooth, even though it was a 
basket-case when I got it.

The engineers at Heath (and the LMO builders - in this case it was TRW) 
did a magnificent job coming up with a high performance (for the time) 
transceiver at a fairly modest price with the legendary Heathkit 
step-by-step assembly procedure in which nearly every possible ambiguity 
or vagueness had been worked out ahead of writing the manual.

73,
Chris, W2PA