[Lafayette] Ha-460 strange experience (sorry, long)

[bonddaleena at aol.com]

Hi. Back 'in the day' (1971), I bought a new HA-460 to use on the various mountain tops back in New England. In my 45 yrs as a ham, this was the MOST fun I ever had. SSB was just starting to show up on 6 Meters, but I had 1 (or 2) 3 el beams and used the 460 from the auto. I NEVER had any problems, and was very happy with the radio. I recently purchased several on ePay, er, eBay. One looks new. The others, kinda rough. 
The purpose of this note is to relay unusual problems I had with several of the radios......

Case #1......
This particular radio was advertised as "condition unknown", no power cord, mic, etc. You all know the story. The final price was VERY cheap. I thought a 'parts unit', if nothing else.
The radio wasn't too bad when I received it, it was packed well. Once I started working on it, I discovered a problem I have NEVER encountered in all the BA I have restored.... EVERY tube in the radio, (all 10) were open. Also, the P/S diodes and the HV fuse were open...... I thought about it and wondered if:
1. the transformer was fubar... or
2. the previous owner (or 2) had tried to power the radio by connecting 115 VAC 'somewhere'.....

For those of you unfamiliar with this radio, it has an 11 pin connector on the back. It will operate on either 12 VDC OR 115 VAC, depending upon which cord you use. As I carefully (!!) put in new tubes, I found an open power resistor, also. HOWEVER, the radio came up and works perfectly. So, the ONLY thing I can think of is, the previous owner must have done a no-no with the AC power. I have had a LOT of BA's with one or maybe two bad tubes, but I just couldn't believe every single tube was nfg!. If I did not have a huge tube inventory, the $ of the 10 tubes would have been 10X what I paid for the radio....

Case #2......
This radio appeared to be brand new. HOWEVER, the seller stated the power transformer 'might' be bad because the radio seemed to get hot very quickly and 'smelled' funny.... Another 'parts radio'????
This one at least came with a proper cord. It fired right up and after a short period, the receiver came up. OK so far. Watching for flames, I noticed 2 new caps in the AC P/S section. I noticed one was discolored, and it was getting hot. I also noticed the value......... (1 uf.). Strange value for an AC bypass cap. Sure enough, it should have been (.1 uf). Replacing these caps, fixed the problem.......

Additionally, I have found that like EVERY Lafayette of this vintage, ALL of the bypass and coupling caps are always NFG. The electrolytics are different. Some will test OK on ESR and/or Value, some will fail. I just replace them all. Having new caps in these old radios, really makes them come alive.

Thanks fer your time,
ron
N4UE (listening to white noise on 50.125 MHz)
EM80of




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