[R-390] S&W R-390A, It's ALIVE!

[Steve Kent]

After checking everything twice and extracting a slug from a transformer 
and replacing three slugs and wiring up the variac, I caught my foot on 
the Ethernet cable that was wrapped around my right shoe and flung my 
laptop off my bench and on to the concrete floor cracking the LCD 
screen. Wonderful! At least the LCD's last image displayed was the Y2k 
manual so it went out in style.

So after a few, well many, choice words, I calmly hooked up my audio 
transformer, speaker, an antenna and brought the voltage up slowly.

Believe it or not, it works! Mostly....  The dial calibration of off by 
about 9kc, I see no action out of the meters and the sensitivity, in 
this non-scientific test, is generally not very hot. So it needs an 
alignment at minimum and some troubleshooting on the meter ckts. There 
are some other strange things going on.  It seems like certain 'ranges' 
on the KC dial are noisy, almost like the noise tracks the mechanical 
rotation of the knob. It also seems like when switching between AGC and 
MGC, the RX goes quiet for about 30 seconds, sometimes.  Need to check 
this out another night.

Regards & 73,
Steve - KW5CQ

All of this wonderful news
Steve Kent wrote:
> After a long wait, I've finally gathered up all the parts that I need to 
> at least get close to plugging this beast in.
>
> Earlier I replaced the missing 455kc crystal in the IF deck.  Why was it 
> was missing? Who knows. This week, I finished rebuilding the 30 and 45 
> uf multi-gang caps and testing the mechanical filters which thankfully 
> seem to be ok. Last night I installed my new L505 choke, R508 2.2K, C511 
> 5000pf, C553 0.01uf and replaced the notorious leaky corroded 8uf in the 
> audio section with a 10uf @ 35v Sprague axial. Pulled the PS section to 
> give it a look over and guess what? I found CR801 & CR802 underneath 
> V801 & V802! So I pulled V801 & V802 out and set them aside. Diodes 
> checked good. Seems like someone saw empty tube sockets and stabbed two 
> tubes in. It looks like the socket bases were bent and then un-bent. I 
> also replaced some missing tube shields throughout the receiver.
>
> Tonight, I will replace the three broken tuning slugs; hopefully I can 
> get the two old ones out easily, one is missing. More importantly, I 
> will check and double check all of my work done in the IF section.
>
> I am getting pretty close to bringing this thing up on the variac.... 
> Maybe tonight?
>
> 73,
> Steve - KW5CQ
>
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