[Premium-Rx] ZL3AG intro

[zl3ag at radioengineering.com]

Hi fellow premium receiver fans!

A short(?) intro...

My main receiver used while broadcast DXing in the 1980/90's was the Racal RA17L, which I would say was an early "premium" receiver. I now have 4 of them, but none currently in active service.

As a radio tech in those days for New Zealand's Post Office, I was station at their HF receiving station - Makara Radio - where we used Harris 4ISB and Cubic receivers alongside some older stuff like Collins 51-S1 and a seldom-used rack of 3 AR-88's with a diversity unit. We provided reception for phone/data circuits to Antarctica, and remote Pacific Islands, with the companion transmitter site being further north at Himitangi.

Since then I have been a fan of the Drake R8B, using it with a remote control loop that is tuned by an Arduino that monitors the R8B receiver frequency and auto-tunes the loop to the correct capacitor setting. I'm a Life Member of the NZ Radio DX League, having been editor of their monthly magazine in the past.

I am an avid collector of HP test equipment, and that was how I came to acquire an HP VXI rack with some interesting modules. So I now have a Watkins-Johnson WJ-9119-1 0.1-32MHz VXI module pair (the WJ-9119-1/LO and WJ-9119A-1/RF) - although they have Signia-IDT branding as well. When sold by HP as a complete system they were given HP model numbers WJC9119M and WJC9119S (the earlier WJ-9119/LO was WJC9119L and the WJ-9119A/RF was WJC9119R).

The WJ 9119-1 provides a block of 8MHz of HF spectrum (analog output) for the downstream ADC and DSP modules to play with. The earlier 9119 provides 4MHz.

The rack unfortunately came without documentation or software, so while searching for those on the interwebs I discovered the Premium-RX mailing list, so that's why I'm here!

My fingers and toes are now crossed, hoping that someone here has a operators/programming manual for the WJ-9119! There should be a C driver library floating around too. I doubt there's much to it - only frequency setting and attenuator control and not much else consider the tuning resolution is 250kHz steps!

Also in the rack was 2 complete HP E6500A 0-1GHz Rx module sets (E6401A and E6402A) so if anyone has any experience with those, I'd love to hear from you as I'm looking forward to getting all these puppies up and running!

There's one video on YT of a similar system for those interested - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QriorqvbGc

Cheers,

Andy
ZL3AG