You did a very, very good job on this radio...it looks factory. Thanks for sharing your collection. I would enjoy haveing only half of what you have....73's
Great job on this video. I am impressed with your collection. I was a builder and user of many Heathkits from 1967 on, mostly ham gear. I have so many good memories tied to Heathkit products.
Nice review! As information the problem with frequency drift can be pretty much eliminated with an add-on VFO stabilizer. The one I installed is the ELcon EL-34 universal VFO stabilizer.
Spectacular! Thank you for showing us this piece of history. Many of it's shortcomings are understandable.. hindsight is easy.. but the one thing that surprises me is the local osc drift. Heath must have known. Not possible not to have. And even half-hearted temp compensation results in huge returns. I know. I love to prototype ultra low drift oscillators for funsies. 73 OM
I built a SW-7800 back in the day. It was required one or more of the circuit boards be 'baked' at a low temp. in the oven - needless to say my mom was not very happy with me! It was a very good receiver that worked very well! I thought my display was a blue/green color but I might be wrong.
Jeff tranter your Hathkit SW_7800 GENERAL CVERAGE receiver is cool my hobbys are painting pictures and lisining to shortwave and ssb iam thinking about getting my ham license I have 4 shortwave receivers me and my cousin are going to a Swap meet June 5th 2022 Sunday morning at 8 am in Milwaukee
I just picked one up today from a estate. No manuals or schematics came with it. It powers up and I tuned around on different frequencies and it did pick up a few. Then it started showing erratic tuning in the display, wouldn't change much. Overall it's in fantastic condition. I would like to find a copy of the manual.
That jogged my memory - as the manual seems to be rare and I have one, I should scan mine and upload it. When I get a chance I will do this, but it is very large. When I do it should show up at www.mods.dk/
Excellent video. Thank you very much! What is the type of bayonet bulb used for S meter illumination? Mine is out. I also need a source for the screw-on telescopic whip. It's missing on my example. Thanks much!
The lamp is a 14V type 53 with bayonet base that is readily available. For the antenna, see the earlier comment here "What is the part number on the antenna...".
The original antenna looks like a custom one for Heathkit that has a loading coil in it. Other than getting one from another SW-7800, you could use just about any telescoping antenna with some loss in performance. Just search sources like Amazon for "replacement telescoping antenna". For best results you would want to use an external antenna.
I think you identified one big reason why Heath got in trouble. Almost tripling the price from one generation of similar product to the next is bad form for retaining your customers. Plus, hands on tech was waning big time in the early 1990s.
i have one also but its out of alignment and only shows it going up to 650 KHz of the frequency then i have to either switch up or down and continue back down something is off. Can you post the alignment proceedures so I can fix this. Thanks Scott
It was pricey for what you got and time consuming to assemble. Signal rejection was not very good and the filters were blah, with no other options. You could buy better used radios on the used market, like Drakes and Hammarlunds, for instance, for the same money, or spend a little more and get a good brand new better radio. The technology was passing the do it yourself level, pricing, and bells and whistles, at that point in time.
I bought one upon its initial release. It was a terrible reciever that I put on the shelf where it remains today. Maybe Ill revisit the mods that others developed to improve on its design flaws. It was my last Heathkit before they closed their doors.
