[Lowfer] Exploration of the ether

[WD8ARZ]

By gosh, I think you nailed it. If that isnt the exact unit I have in a 
box in the basement some where, it is very very similar. Going to make 
an effort to find it. Sure have enough separate parts, and individual 
manual tuners that I have no doubt I will work some thing out fairly soon.

Covering your emails and many others, I am in agreement in the need to 
match this windom dipole antenna to improve the signal to noise ratio. 
One of the reasons I have this windom is its design contributes to self 
matching many of the ham bands. The auto tuner I use then has little 
effort to make up the difference through bands. When I was a kid I used 
a lot of long wires, and learned quickly how much the receive could be 
peaked 80 meters through the broadcast band using a tuner. Dipoles 
improved the situation, but a home brew windom I made 30 years ago made 
it so nice to tune around on a shortwave receiver (receiver only or a 
ham rig covering shortwave) and not to have to do the manual peaking on 
the low bands (40-160 meters). Wasnt unusual to tie the dipole sections 
together to go in to the lower frequencies too .... as some one else 
here said in an earlier email.

Sounds like so many of us have so much in common over our exploration of 
the ether eh? hi Hi HI

73 From Bill - WD8ARZ

On 2/2/2013 10:33 AM, Douglas D. Williams wrote:
> Bill,
>
> I sent you that Burhans article directly.
>
> Since you seem to have several projects going in already, I remembered that
> MFJ produces a receive only "tuner" that supposedly works from 150 kHz to
> 30 MHz. The model number is MFJ-956. I also remembered that I had one in a
> drawer in my closet! Opening it up and comparing it to the four page
> "owner's manual" and schematic, I note that it consists of:
>
> (a) so239 input/output
> (b) from the input the signal first goes through a rotary switch that
> allows the user to select one of four values of inductance (1 uHy, 22 uHy,
> 330 uHy, and 2.5 mHy), or bypass the chokes. The signal then goes through a
> 365 pf variable capacitor.
>
> That's all there is to it. I note that three of the chokes are of the small
> type that resemble regular 1/2 watt resistors, and that it would be easy to
> remove them and replace them with chokes of higher inductance, if one
> wished to lower the frequency range of the unit. I imagine if one removed
> the three smallest value chokes, and replaced them with higher value chokes
> the range of the unit could probably be made to be useful from 10 kHz to
> 500 kHz or higher.
>
> The construction quality is typical MFJ, but there really isn't much to go
> wrong with the unit, unless the rotary switch just wears out.
>
>
> 73, Doug KB4OER