[Johnson] tales of one ranger one

[Bill Cromwell]

Hi,

My first posts here involved using my Ranger in QRP operation. I found
that it will dial down to less than a watt as-is. That may or may not
work om AM but I am using it for CW.

My Johnson Ranger hadn't been used in several years so I first eased the
caps awake and then let it warm up for a while. I use the CW/AM
transmitters of yesteryear in the CW mode only. My Ranger on 40 meters
had the godofal type of chirp with yoop and steady drift first down then
up and back down again! I started cleaning and tightening things. My
"chernobyl" resistor had already been taken care of but somebody left
almost *ALL* of the nuts off the studs from the VFO enclosure under the
chassis. I replaced those and loosened/retightened the screws on the
sides. I swapped a 6AH6 in place of the 6AU6 oscillator tube and I even
swapped in a new gas regulator tube. The regulator was the only thing
that didn't make any difference but the problem was still severe.

The low voltage power supply was sagging terribly with the key down from
325 volts down to 220 volts DC!! I changed the filter cap for a brand
new and much smaller one. No change! The only thing left aside from the
transformer itself is the rectifier. I mounted some SS diodes on an
octal plug and put it in place. I wasn't going to solid state the power
supplies until I replace some more of the weak link parts, but... The
new rectifier unit solved the problem. The voltage is higher of course
at just over 400 volts but only drops by eight volts under full load.
The buffer and multiplier stages are not changing the loading on the
oscillator so much. The tired old tube just couldn't cut the mustard any
more. I still have enough chirp to notice it up on 15 meters but 40 is
sounding really good now and so is 20. I'm "burning it in" for a while
this morning and if it's still okay later I'll be doing some QRP work
with it on the air.

By the way, the audio tubes have been removed from my Ranger as there is
no need for them on CW and the whole transmitter runs cooler with lower
power consumption.

I'm thinking of building a separate, external, heterodyne oscillator
with a keyed mixer to completely eliminate the chirp problem. A VFO for
that application would only have output on 160 and 40 meters just as the
built-in vfo has. Ahem...output for 11 meters will not be needed. Has
anybody built or used a heterodyne VFO on one of these rigs?

73,

Bill  KU8H