[Johnson] more Ranger adventures

[Jim]

All that Al said plus:
Many of the components are well past their expiration date...
I replaced almost all the capacitors in my Ranger, including the silver 
micas in the VFO.

Jim



> Hi Bill,
> It is curable, but might take a while ;-)
> One problem with the Rangers is that the VFO is on the operating freq
> for 40m.  They are prone to getting RF feedback when doing that, which
> will cause symptoms like yours.  You need to be mechanically tight,
> loosen & retighten all screws, particularly those for ground lugs and
> shields, including those at tube sockets.  I'm sure there's some info
> back in the archives of this list that speak to that, it you can't find
> anything easily, let me know, I'll dig in my stuff.
> I had the problem badly in a Valiant, and ended up making a sliding
> ground for one tuning shaft that went thru the panel & wasn't well
> grounded. You can read abt that at
> <http://www.boatanchors.org/valiant.htm>  The Ranger may not have that
> particular cause of problem.
> 73,
>
> Al, W8UT
> www.boatanchors.org
> www.hammarlund.info
>
> "There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much
> worth doing as simply messing about in boats"
> Ratty, to Mole
>
> On 8/6/2011 2:25 PM, Bill Cromwell wrote:
>> 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
>>
>> _____________________________________
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