[R-390] re:Clock

[Tisha Hayes]

I guess the thing that has always bothered me the most about the R-390A is
the dingy look that the panel meters have. The greyish-greenish low
resolution escutcheon, reminiscent of ASCII art or a 320x240 printer output,
inconsistent contrast between the lettering/ scale and the black background.

Sure most of those suckers are radioactive from Ra 226 paint but they could
have given more care in the escutcheon design, they look more like an
afterthought. I have been spoiled by looking at Westinghouse panel meters in
electric generating plants and substations that look like pieces of art.
Going into a substation at O'Dark Thirty in the morning to resolve a
problem, the metering all needs to be clear and legible.

I would like to re-do all of the meter faces with black on white lettering,
S units and dB scaling for RF, mV and dB scaling for AF, maybe add a few
more scales for B+, line voltage, AGC level to the line meter. Add a few
"hidden" switch positions to the line meter switch to monitor B+, line and
AGC.

I have the training to remove the Ra 226 from the panel meters (I still
teach radiation safety and decon, and before I went for an electrical
engineering degree I was working on my physics degree). I could do the
strip-down safely and contain the waste in a way to render it safe for
decades (encapsulate in acrylic resin and drop it in an old lead pig). Of
course I would not want to go into buidness of doing that work but it might
be fun to do it on my own rigs. (NRC nightmares and permitting, euck).

Right now I am working on my gigantic console project and hanging equipment
in racks, I still need to make an antenna switching matrix and do quite a
bit of programming on the touch panel computer mounted in the rack for
decoding digital modes (need to put those Dovetrons to work other than
spewing data to a COM port on a laptop). The R-390A panel meter project is
pretty low down on the list well after the roofing filter mods and rehabbing
every spare module in my collection.

It would seem almost sacrilige to tear out the line level meter to put in a
clock but with some rework, the line level meter could serve many other
functions that are important to the operation of the R-390A

Tisha
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