Tuning up the Heathkit HW-101 

I have a HW-101 and now use 6146A only. I picked up a new pair of 6146B some years ago and had a lot of trouble neutralizing them. And since I failed with the 6146B finals, I have heard that many other folks are also having the same problem. The B tubes reportedly have a slight power increase, but it's not worth it if the tubes can't be neutralized. So I don't worry about it and everything is fine now. I get about 115 watts out on 80, 40, 20 and 15 and slightly less on 10.

Good deal. Didn't mean to rain on your parade and you are providing a service to the newer guys who might want to play with Vintage equipment. BTW, the HW 101 is a classy but simple rig. There are many simple mods you can do to the 101 to make it much better. I used one for several years and had a lot of fun with it back in the early 80's. I still have several 101's in my warehouse and plan to resurrect one sometime. 73, Glenn WA4AOS

I just realized that I never did a response to this vid, so I'm now making amends. I much appreciate your tuning demo. Great job. Helped a lot...especially the transmitter/course...antenna/fine correlations. Somehow I had missed that. I've just about got the procedure down pat. It turned out that the mic amp tube (6EA8) was a good part of the first CQ problem. The gain was cranked to the max, but still not fully up to par. A new tube is now in there. Much better. Thanks again, John

i was hoping to see you adjust the radio

This becomes especially important when working with high power or high duty cycle modes such as AM or RTTY.

You can get the transmitter very close to tune and never key the transmitter up just by listening to the peaking of the received noise

Hello, Usually I always try to find a clear frequency and listen before I tune up. I think I was concentrating so much on trying to make the video and remembering to mention everything that I wanted to over the video's duration that I failed to listen first. I didn't peak the preselector beforehand because I wanted to start with the radio's final circuit out of resonance. This way I could illustrate the effect adjusting the preselector has on the power output.

@joernone Hey John, Thanks a lot for the kind words. I'm glad you were able to find some use in this video. It's something that you need to get used to. Eventually you'll be able to do it without even thinking. I'm glad to hear that you found the issue and I hope you're having a lot of fun on the air with it! - Mike

@umajunkcollector Yep! I've been following his video series on his HW-101. Hopefully I'll be around to say hello to him when he's on the air.

You never listened before you started tuning. Even a weak carrier can be very annoying to others using the frequency before you started tuning on top of them. This is also against FCC regs to cause interference. You might try listening first and peaking the preselector for maximum receive noise. This will generally get that in range. To further reduce interference, don't worry about getting a 1:1 match. 1:5 or less is fine. I can't overemphasis the importance to LISTENING before QRM-ing QSO's

In regards to achieving a 1:1 match I always try to eliminate all traces of reflected power *if possible*. Again, I do this on a clear frequency and I also have a tuning chart that shows roughly what settings to have the antenna at for each band so that adjustment time is minimal. Reflected power needs to be dissipated somewhere and some of it is being radiated as heat in the finals. If you can save any stress at all on the finals then why not?

I am having problems neutralizing a pair of 6146Bs in my HW-101. Someone said, I should pull those and use 6146 or 6146A tubes and not use the 8298s. Should I go back to 6146s? I also have a Heathkit SA2060A antenna tuner. I just finished cleaning up, and wrapping some of the straps in silicon tape, where they had a tendency to arc. It works great on anything I can run through it, so far anyway..