A couple more classics

[N8YX]

Lots of 11M denizens love their various "export" model radios - or to operate amateur radio rigs on the band. I prefer the old-school/vintage - legal - way of doing things, as QRP is more challenging anyway.

One of the CB mags of the day used to run ads for various rigs. The TRS Challenger 1400 was one of them.

I looked for decades (not just years) for one of these. Also got the AM-only version - the 1200. The latter is going to get modded in that the 1st IF filter could be swapped from the OEM 2-pole MCF to a canned 8-pole type, thereby increasing adjacent channel rejection. What's interesting about the 1400 is that the IF filter is a variable-bandwidth type, as is used with the CPI series of radios. Those sets turned in some of the highest adjacent-channel rejection numbers ever recorded, but I don't have any figures for the TRS series available.

The receivers are very sensitive, comparing favorably to my high-end ham rigs.

When I have the 1400 on I'll be QSX on 38LSB.

17409

[K4PIH]

Kind of reminds me of my Tram D201 with the wooden panels.

[WZ7U]

Nicer looking than my Cobra 2000! Kewl.

[kb2crk]

1741217413

I only have old relics like these.
I think I fixed it. No my pics but I have these and they still work

[KG4CGC]

Hey, Paul. Try again with the pics. Sometimes you have to do the job twice.

[N8YX]

Hey, Paul. Try again with the pics. Sometimes you have to do the job twice.

True, that.

Bites me a LOT when posting stuff cached locally.

[ad4mg]

Hey, Paul. Try again with the pics. Sometimes you have to do the job twice.


Use the advanced editor, not the quick reply interface, to attach photos. It seems to minimize this 'feature'. I have never been able to get a handle on why this software does this. I preferred phpBB over vBulletin, but security was a major issue with phpBB.

[kb2vxa]

Being a thermionic valve man in a vacuum tube country and a tube man in a transistorized world the chicken box that had the best selectivity was this Courier 1M. It was out of alignment when I received it, the transmitter was straightforward using standard third overtone 30pF crystals, but being the only triple conversion receiver and having an odd injection scheme I couldn't make sense of it. Then I got lucky, Gabor "Gabby" Incze the design engineer was a local CBer. He aligned it and showed me how, the receiver came to life. I used three communications receivers on 11M, two double conversion, none could hold a candle to the little Courier. Back then I had tubes up the wazoo (ouch) and they were cheap as dirt, today is a different story.

17415

[kb2crk]

Here are 2 I have in the garage but They most likely wont work now.
The lafayette was fun as you could split frequency with it.... two full receivers in one radio. was easy to add extra channels too but that was before my ham days

[N8YX]

Not a pic of mine, but I have two of these (dual RX; similar to the Lafayette setup):

17427

[kb2vxa]

I just went over the pictures again, this time with my eyes open and noticed the SBE Sidebander II. My father had one in his car, but with only a few slopbucketeers on channel 16 neither of us took much interest in it. Eh, I on the base used something with a little more faar in the waar. NO, that Johnson desk kilowatt was over in Brooklyn and his handle was Windjammer. "Take gas! Take the pipe! Take the GAS PIPE!"

[WØTKX]

One of my favorite CB rigs was the SBE Brute.

Why? Because I was into small cars before it was popular.
From my Opel Mantas to Toyota Celicas, nice radio.

https://rigreference.com/storage/thumbnails/rigs/78/4923/sbe-brute-302x248-resize.jpg?token=0a3d1616ade23421940b4de73cd99f17

I did minor mods to it, mild asymmetrical modulation, and 14 watts carrier.
So, 25 watts "swing" clean as a whistle, because "boots" really sucked.

Later, I got a Johnson Messenger 23ch 352 SSB. I found another one about 6 years ago.
Not modded yet, I know what to do. Just a nice RX out of the box. One of the best.

[kb2vxa]

From Lakewood, NJ to Lakewood, CO, did you listen to it in another CB with a male voice not yours transmitting? The male voice is asymmetrical to begin with, and anything over 120% positive modulation distorts in an ordinary diode detector. I know, chicken banders are distortion happy with their "power mics" cranked to 11, if it's not raspy to the point of being unintelligible they tell you it's not loud enough. I've always been a purist whenever I Stereoized (modified) a transmitter for our little band of AM Gangstas. Oh BTW, AM Gangstas use AM Gangsta mics like my Altec, that's why AM stands for Angel Music.

17441

[WØTKX]

Warren, I did it wrong. Of course.













Meh.

[kb2vxa]

If you were an AM Gangsta working on a boat anchor CW/AM ham transmitter you did it wrong. My bad, I forgot we're in the CB forum. Since you were working on a CB radiddeo the rule is "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, doo waa doo waa doo waa.". Just turn the Turner +2 up to 11 and let the cheese grater sound fill their ears and they'll be happy.

[kb2crk]

If you were an AM Gangsta working on a boat anchor CW/AM ham transmitter you did it wrong. My bad, I forgot we're in the CB forum. Since you were working on a CB radiddeo the rule is "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, doo waa doo waa doo waa.". Just turn the Turner +2 up to 11 and let the cheese grater sound fill their ears and they'll be happy.

Turner Expander 500 was more fun. My dad had a SBE brute in the car, tiny for its day

[kb2vxa]

I suppose you could expand your horizons modifying it like I did an Astatic TUG-9 stand I used with a 10-DA head for FM and everyday SSB and a D-104 head for SSB DX with an Icom IC706Mk2G. I reconfigured the preamp for 12V phantom power and an attenuator on the output that gave a wider and finer gain control as not to overload the Icom. Rather than using the mic jack that had its own preamp and provided 8V 10mA phantom power for the stock electret hand mic easily blown using a preamp (as W2SJW found out trying to put a Motorola desk mic on it) I handed the job to Frankenstein Laboratories they wired it up to the adapter for the digital input on the rear chassis skirt. KB2VXA was Frankenstein Laboratories when I still had a workplace, a division of Altec Communications, a sideline run by Scott W2SJW.

There was a much smaller solid state 23 channel AM rig by Courier that was the best ever in its class bar none. It had an ordinary run of the mill transmitter, but what made it stand head and shoulders above the rest was a JFET front end. Back in the day Ramblin' Jack later WA2V (SK) and I hooked uo as a receiver alongside the Stereoized Johnson Valiant transmitter at Thunder Base in Beachwood. We had a stealth station with an antenna hidden in the tree behind the house. When turned on there was silence, with the volume full up there was an almost inaudible hiss, we thought it was DOA. We went around the channels, heard nothing, then suddenly a loud voice burst from the external speaker, it works. It was our old friend Bus Driver in Atlantic City calling us on our local monitoring channel, a QSO started. Soon High Pockets comes on accusing us of ghost talking, he had stacked 3el beams on a tower and a 100W and a Courier BL-100 amp. Such amps BTW sounded good, proper AB2 rather than Texas Star or Dave Made basement pill junk halfway into Class C. "Turn the beams on Atlantic City and say hello" we told him, he did, Bus Driver answered, he still didn't hear him. On came the amp, another answer, and another accusation of ghost talking. Bus driver cracked up, High pockets angry as a wet hornet stormed off, we continued our QSO.

There were plenty of those slinkys on CB, when we found one the letters stood for Chop Busting since we couldn't push them down the stairs. The Slinky all band dipole was a myth as a Boy Scout Troupe ARC found out at an ARRL sponsored hamfester. With space severely limited in the building's open back porch they set one up on a clothesline and pulley arrangement, but like engineering marvels of that nature what looks good on paper never works in practice. Even with a matchbox feeding it with open wire line it was SWR City, living proof that Boy Scouts never fart in uniform.

17448

[N8YX]

I got an Aries A-MB5RB (same as a Zetagi MB+5, Syncron MB-5000 and numerous other "OEM" badgings) from the auction site. Wired it up to the 1200 and it sounds about as good as I care to make a 4w Class D set sound, The mic has a gain and a transmit tone control (neither of which the TRS rigs incorporated) and a switch-selectable roger beep (ditto). You definitely want to run the tone at "full treble" in order to avoid distortion.

Next up is a power switch replacement in the 1400.

[kb2vxa]

There you go, any less than 10 on the tone control will make for muddy sounding audio (it only cuts highs) and any less than 11, (turning the gain pot until the knob snaps off) they'll tell you that your audio is low. You think I'm kidding? It gets hysterical on 19 the trucker channel thanks to the truck stop "techs" and their golden screwdrivers, I straightened out more than one mess. BTW when the VU needle wraps around the pin leave it for bragging rights. Gotta love the roger beep, a knockoff repeater courtesy tone definitely needed on CB. When "da skp's runnin'" with all the noise it's impossible to tell when a transmission ends without it. ('->) I never did figure out why most ham repeaters use courtesy tones, WHAT courtesy? Commercial repeaters and a few ham repeaters don't have them, police repeaters and a few ham repeaters have no tails either.

I always got glowing unsolicited audio reports because I used the right mic for the job and never a preamp where none was needed like the line input on the Icom. I used the Shure 404B lo Z dynamic hand mic on my 23 channel Laughingyet (Lafayette) solid state mobile, and the Shure 444 hi Z on the Courier 1M tube base rig. The before pictured Altec 150 ohm balanced mic with a UTC "Ouncer" matching transformer in the Shure PTT base was for my AM Gangsta setup, modified Heathkit twins, the "scratchy Apache" TX and Mohawk RX. 100W is the ideal power level, it gives an edge without attracting attention, and with good sounding audio (not that muddy leenyar sound) nobody notices. The other AM Gangstas in our little group used modified Johnson Valiants I never liked for a number of reasons, Artie "Windjammer" in Brooklyn used a a desk kilowatt with a Ranger exciter, now THAT really stood out, and so close to the FCC at 201 Varick Street too!

Oh before I forget, the Demco Power Modulator preamp could have been used as a modulator and then some all by itself. Inside the box was a 12AX7 speech amp driving a 6BQ5 beam power pentode that operated Class A into a 5.2K load put out 5.7W @ 10% THD. The average Class D CB transmitter unmodified has at least that much distortion, AM broadcast transmitters are typically rated at 4% right at the edge of human perception.

17449

17450

17451

[KG4CGC]

The classics are nice and I've never had anything as esoteric as what's being shown here.
Got an old Philippines Uniden Washington and Cobra 140 GTL that needs the meter replaced.
The 140 has a clarifier mod that's way over the top. 6kc in either direction.

[edited to add] The Washington was a barn find restored from a somewhat corroded chassis and crud covered face. Looks like new.
I wasn't responsible for the restoration.

[kb2vxa]

Was that Uniden the "export model" with a 30W mod legal on the 11M BRS channels between 22 and 23 with 4 more above 23 and a speech processor? A couple of friends had them, one had an Israeli accent the processor didn't like so he left it off. 30W didn't matter much to the other guy, he was on the side of a hill with an Avante .64 wave vertical. His signal rivaled my 100W Heathkit Apache into a vertical dipole aka Shakespeare Big Stick I hated because of heavy precipitation static buildup on the fiberglass sheath. When I destroyed it in a second testing a 500W amp (An antenna rated at a kilowatt?) I repaired I replaced it with a 5/8 wave Cushcraft Ringo, no more static. BTW that was one great sounding little amp because instead of sweep tubes or "pills" biased into Class C it used a forced air cooled 4CX250A biased AB1. The owner's handle was... get this... Flipperdoo.

[KG4CGC]

No. Standard for US market.

[kb2vxa]

I think you misunderstood. I put "export model" in parentheses because it's a common term for 10M ham rigs and similar items easily modified for 11M "freeband" and related illegal purposes.Chuckling, what ham would buy a 10M rig when 160-10M all mode rigs are available for the same price? The Uniden I had in mind could be used legally on the afore mentioned US BRS channels before the band was expanded upward to 40 channels and went to 30W by jumping out a resistor. Unfortunately the model is long forgotten. I knew other rigs with the same jumper mod, none were used legally.

[KG4CGC]

Was that Uniden the "export model" with a 30W mod legal on the 11M BRS channels between 22 and 23 with 4 more above 23 and a speech processor?


I thought this was a question directed at my old Washington.

Then you wrote: [QUOTE=kb2vxa;674974]I think you misunderstood. I put "export model" in parentheses because it's a common term for 10M ham rigs and similar items easily modified for 11M "freeband" and related illegal purposes.Chuckling, what ham would buy a 10M rig when 160-10M all mode rigs are available for the same price? The Uniden I had in mind could be used legally on the afore mentioned US BRS channels before the band was expanded upward to 40 channels and went to 30W by jumping out a resistor. Unfortunately the model is long forgotten. I knew other rigs with the same jumper mod, none were used legally.

Have you priced a new export rig vs say, a new ham rig? Not comparable plus, some hams want to keep things simple with readily available accessories, antennas etc. [edited for clarification] Simplicity in a (mono) bander though technically you could call it a tribander.
Older rigs for 10/11m are now getting to where they run into issues due age and how many times they have changed hands as well as hams being notorious for thinking their 35 year old HR2500 is worth $400 or a 55 year old FT-101 is worth upwards of $500 and more, much more.
Yeah, it seems like I'm contradicting you and I get that. We're in 2 different worlds. I just wish you could hear the local 10m ragchewing in the evenings and late nights. I feel many have lost their way. I won't get political here but how can you have a life long career in a field that is based 100% on Science and then use science to get on the air to go on and shun science, at length?

OK. That's all I got to say about that.


17455

[kb2vxa]

I have never seriously kept track of make, model, or price of new CB or AR gear. Mine was old and second hand aka boat anchors except for my last, an Icom IC706MK2G bought before the price shot through the roof. IIRC the model that replaced it went for over a G note, too rich for the blood of the average ham.
"We're in 2 different worlds."
True that, I'm a tube man in a transistor world, like Joe Walsh of The Eagles an Analog Man (2012 album), and now paper, mind that match.
"I just wish you could hear the local 10m rag chewing in the evenings and late nights."
Don't have to, I used to hear some of the "10M CB" crew that was joined by DX during band openings. Because they were off the end of the dipole I couldn't put in enough signal to get attention, and a vertical would have been NG due to cross polarization loss... oh well. BTW Jack WA2V (SK) and I went way back to 1965 on Chicken Band, his sharp wit made us laugh hysterically. Now tell me, didn't he look like Chuck Norris?

17457

17458