[Premium-Rx] WJ 8709

[Eric Gauja]

Greetings to all list members,
                                              I have just been accepted 
into this list, being a recent purchaser of a WJ 8709. From my experience, 
WJ receivers are not all that common here in Australia.  My set, S/N 183, 
came via the Royal Australian Navy. There seems to be a reasonable amount 
of information regarding WJ sets on the internet, which I have read over, 
and also many interesting past posts to this list. However, I still have 
some questions/ thoughts that I would like to put to this list.
1)    It seems that the 8709 is a "no frills" or basic half rack version of 
the 8718 or similar variants.  I have had no success in tracking down a 
full manual for the 8709, although I have photocopies of a fair number of 
the schematics and the first few pages of the manual with brief description 
and specifications. I suspect that the 8718 manual circuitry would be the 
same  for the 8709 also. Fair Radio does sell a 8718 manual, but I see from 
some earlier posts that their version of the manual may be incomplete. At 
the moment, I  am mainly interested in the circuitry description part of 
the manual.
2)    My 8709 performs very well, but seems to have 2 areas where problems 
could be occurring-
        a)   After the set has been on for a few hours, and is warm,  when 
I change frequency from say 5020KHz DOWN to 5019 KHz,
              there seems to be a long period where something loses lock, 
and I just receive noise, until lock suddenly occurs. This only
              happens going down in frequency from multiples of 10. It does 
not occur tuning up, or tuning down from numbers that are
              not multiples of 10. And it only happens when the set has 
warmed up . This doesn't really cause me any trouble at this stage,
              but I am wondering whether this could be an early sign of a 
developing fault?

        b)   The  line output audio seems to suffer from hum.  Again , this 
does not cause me any real trouble because I use a speaker
               driven by a 600/8 ohm transformer from the phones output, 
and this output shows no sign of hum.

3)    Since finding this list,  it has been very interesting reading the 
past posts, not only about WJ equipment, but about  receiver topics in 
general. I congratulate the moderators and list members on some very 
interesting and informative posts.

                                                                                                            Best 
Regards from Downunder!
                                                                                                                                                                   Eric.