I have a receiver that looks just like the HA700, it is the Allied A-2515, all transistor. Picked it up at ham club, a SK wife gave a whole van full of radio equipment to the club. No one wanted old radios just the newer stuff. Was in the original box with manuals and dust cover works great. I use it for short wave listening and AM broadcast. Have been a ham sense 1965 so like the old and new equipment. Thanks for the great videos. Tom, W7GER
The Japanese manufacturers were very good at reuse of parts when going from tube to solid state. Why redesign a perfectly good cabinet, slide rule dial assembly and variable capacitors?
I really enjoy your laid-back and informative videos. I was licensed in 71 as a 15 year old novice in 71 and I could tell some stories about messes I made as a kid. However, my early interest in Amateur Radio led to a career as an EE and owner of 3 electronics biz's over the years. 73, Glenn
Thanks for making this series, I really enjoyed it. Not only the radio aspects but as a Brit, the American lifestyle history is fascinating. Especially when compared to the British experience at the time, which was much more limited and frugal in the early post war years till the 1960s.
Yes I get that impression. We had a this social program after the war called the GI bill, that really elevated a whole generation into the middle class.
@@MIKROWAVE1 We had post war austerity which took a long time to recover from. I was born in 1952 and sugar rationing was still in place until the following year, 1953. Even very basic radios were expensive and treasured items. My parents were the generation who were encouraged to "make do and mend" in the war and it became a habit. I think our home broadcast radio receiver, an old GEC may have been a wedding present but so precious at the time, it was kept and used till they died. Then it mysteriously disappeared but I managed to find and buy the same model for personal nostalgia.
That brought up some memories. I was one of those Long Island budding engineer kids growing up only a mile from the Bethpage/Farmingdale area, going to Walt Whitman High School and learning how to program and service the school's DEC PDP-8i mini-computer -- one of only four high schools in the country lucky enough to have one at the time. I also played around with electronics and learned to fly airplanes at Republic Airfield in the 1970s. Republic was where Grumman Aerospace designed and built many of their famous WWII "Cat" naval fighter planes such as the Grumman F4F Wildcat, F6F Hellcat and later the F14 Tomcat, as well as the Apollo Lunar Module. I also remember some of the fly-by-night electronics parts resellers that popped up intermittently on the island back then, but they lacked the polish of the big names like Lafayette Radio and Radio Shack. Now even those companies are gone.
That AR3 brings back memories for me. It was my first receiver when I got my license back in 1963; it also powered my transmitter a single 6AQ5 MOPA feeding a 130 ft long wire. Ted VE6AMR
My first starter radio that I bought, after a 1939 Detrola that my Dad gave me, was a Lafayette HE-40... a knock off of a S-120. Spent many hours being a 12 year old SWL with that radio. I think most of those style of radios were sold to kids who didn't have a lot of money and no clue how basic a receiver they were. But it served it's purpose and I still have both of them. I listen to the Reds using the Detrola, that I restored a few years ago. de WA8SDF
@@MIKROWAVE1 oh I could feel it on the HE-40's chrome strip. Learned not to touch the cabinet. At that age I had no idea about AC-DC or AA5 radios. I couldn't spell the word schematic, let alone let alone read one, or understand what I was looking at. Life was so simple back then.
Thank you very much! I'm too young and I was interested to see old technologies and a demonstration of their work. In Ukraine, I have never seen such equipment at all.
I think it was in Popular Electronics a do it yourself project for a multi-band shortwave antenna utilizing Radio Shack's solid Black and White insulated capacitance wire. You wound coils on open air spools for the bands and then connected solid wire cut to a certain link, then connected it to the coils, in a series. Two lengths. One connected to shield and the other connected to center of a coaxial cable.
Some receivers (not this one) have a continuously variable "IF BANDWIDTH" knob. I mean not a multiple position switch, but a rotation knob, most likely a potentiometer ? Could someone explain how VARIABLE IF bandwidth is implemented in those receivers. One would say: put a resistor across the tuned circuit and the Q factor will go down, but this seems to be too easy to be true ? A theoretical but not a practical solution ? Another way I can imagine is to offset one filter relative to a second one ? Again this this sounds unreliable ? (I understand wide FM filters are tuned this way, but here I refer to narrow CW-SSB-AM filters, as well as early receivers) Finally I say that a varactor is used to detune the resonnant frequency, but not the bandwidth. Help. Thanks.
Having to constantly tune and retune the knobs on a Q Multiplier would drive me nuts. I was surprised at how much AF is lost with the Q tuned. In some listening situations, I’ll take the noise.
Yes it is a sharp situation that cuts sidebands and noise, and yes it is a knob twister! But filtering towards the front is more effective than filtering at the end of the processing. That said, those early DSP audio processors in the 90s were quite good.
Its funny but thats what I love about the old radios, you were so much more involved in resolving the reception quality... not just punching in a freq. & letting the microprocessor do all the work like we do today.... and I also love the fact that you could get all these add-ons to make a good radio better.... today we would just go out and buy a new "better" radio...throwing money at it is not my idea of a hobby... 🤔
