[Johnson] more Ranger adventures

[Bill Cromwell]

Hi,

I have been having the devil of a time with the VFO stability (40
meters) on my Ranger. Without tearing it all apart I have cleaned up the
band switch and the wipers in the calibration caps as best I can. The
160/80 meter bands sound like xtal control and the 40 through 10 meter
bands are just plain ugly, drifty, wobbly, etc. On the 40 meter setting
the frequency changes markedly from the zero to the cw key. It chirps
and yoops and hops all over the place. I had made some improvements
earlier but now it's worse than ever. I'm taking it out of the
transmitter to work it over. It's difficult or impossible to do very
much with it mounted in the Ranger. I think I can see some solder joints
back in there that are not just the very best I have ever seen. I'm
going to whiz up a power supply for it so that I can whip and beat on it
without the entire Ranger hanging on the ends of the wires. More later
as I make some progress.

I like the Ranger and if I can make it work right I'll be using it for
low power, tube based operation in my station. It will fit right in with
my QRP ops - it dials down well under 5 watts. Since I am not very
interested in AM phone I have removed the audio tubes so the Ranger is
not eating up power for those. It may turn out that the best I can do on
40 meters (and up) will not be good enough (a little bit of 'character'
is OK) so that I might try building an external VFO to plug into one of
the xtal sockets. The external VFO would use a heterodyne scheme so the
oscillators can run all the time and just key the mixer. Output at 1.75
to 2 MC and 7 to 7.4 (or less) MC of course. 11 meters sounds even worse
than 40 - 10 meters, but who cares about 11 meters? Yes I'll try to fix
11 meters, too, just so the Ranger works like it's supposed to.

73,

Bill  KU8H