[NJARC] Hallicrafters SX-111 Mk. 1

[Scott Roberts]

Greetings!
I'm sure many of you noticed my call last week looking
for a Hallicrafters SX-111 receiver: John Ruccolo came
through wonderfully on a spare Mk 1 he had awaiting...
Thanks Again John! Just thought I'd pass along a
progress report, see if I could drag in a few ideas...


I started working with it Friday night, after getting
home from the meeting- I am slowly learning how to
find a signal, tweak a signal, and pull it in legibly,
using the BFO, and balancing out the RF and Audio
gains, as well as trimming up the antenna and
narrowing the selectivity and adjusting the notch
freq... However, despite having both the ANL and AVC
on, I still get a good bit of "woosh" or "white noise"
in the backround, which I am attributing to the
original "bumblebee" type caps still being in place. 

Currently, I am using my "Alzwhire*" antenna strung up
across the inside of the attic, and then down at an
angle from near the peak to near the front... It is an
abominable amalgamation of a few different styles of
antenna- basically about a 40 ft. wire, split at the
mid point, with an additional run from the end of one
side down following the slope of the roof for about 20
additional feet, that side only... It was mainly
intended to drag in some sort of radio signal... It
seems to work moderately, as I am pulling in VOX from
Texas, Mississippi, and Florida this afternoon. My
shop test antenna is a 40 ft. wire, strung parallel to
above, but without the dogleg.(I live in a house in a
community which frowns upon aerials outside. And the
house is an electric interference pit- even the T.O.
works poorly in here...This is temporary, but the
condition at the moment)

I am trying to figure how to: 1.Clean up the signals
coming in some more; 2 Replace the bumblebee caps- I
am having trouble discrening some of the colors(black
& blue, mainly) due to the age of them.(Does anyone
have a website which shows the conversion for
bumblebee color codes?)

Lastly, does anyone have a good, simple and effective
way of re-securing a tube in its base? I have a couple
which are good tubes, but are loose in their bases, as
the original stuff has given up.

Thanks to everyone in advance, I'll be looking for the
mountain of replies ;) 
Scott

*"Alzwhire": a contraction of "Alzheimer's" and "Wire"
to indicate a very confused "Random wire" antenna!


       
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