W9BSP: A HAM'S HAM, A TEACHER'S TEACHER

     His name was Marshall H. Ensor.  He was a shop teacher in Olathe, Kansas; except for a stint traning radiomen during WW II, he spent most of his life there.  He spent it talking to the world and not just idle chatter, either -- Marshall Ensor (and his sister Loretta) spent evenings sending code practice and "teaching radio by radio," a free-for-the-listening lecture course over the powerful W9BSP - W9UA transmitter.

     I'd read all this in back issues of ARRL's magazine QST.  What I didn't know is the house where they lived is now a museum and the grounds around it are a park.  That big transmitter, in its fine-furniture cabinet, is back on the air again.

     As a shop teacher, he reached thousands.  There's no way to know how many people, all over the world, he taught about radio.  Tens of thousands?  (This modest man admitted in a resume sent to the U. S. Navy, "Reputed to have trained more radio operators than any other individual in the United States.") And all from a farmhouse in Kansas.

STANCOR 10P TRANSMITTER: UPDATE 11

     Mounted and partially wired the volume control, wired up more of the 6L6 RF amp last night:

     Closeup of the tube wiring.  Still have the power supply to wire up.

     Inventorying my end-link transmitter coils from Bud and Barker & Williamson, 160, 80, 20, 10 and 5 meters I have in good shape.  For 40m, I repaired a coil earlier.have nothing marked and I'll just have to see if any of the unmarked ones will hit the band.  If not, I guess I'll be making one.  (My earlier notions were incorrect.  For some reason, I thought I'd repaired an 80m coil.)

STANCOR 10P TRANSMITTER: PART 10

     I made some impressive-looking progress this afternoon and stopped to photograph it because it's an example of a technique not everyone knows about: prewiring.

Photo is very large if you click on it

     There are a number of controls and jacks mounted on the front panel and it's a pretty tight fit.  Rather than mount them and try to get into a small space with needlenose pliers, soldering iron and solder, I wired up the most challenging (a multi-contact jack and a toggle switch) on the bench, and connected the input transformer to the microphone jack before installing it.

     This results in quite a few wires cut a little longer than necessary.  Yes, there will be some waste and yes, they sell that stuff by the foot, but how much does frustration cost?  By color-coding them, it it's easier to sort them out -- blue is plate return, red is B+, gray is cathode and switched ground, and black is ground, which are (mostly) old-time standard colors.

     The audio level control remains to be wired up and put in.  It mounts right in front of the rectifier tube, so lead dress will be important.  You can see the shielded lead from the mic transformer headed over to the empty hole in the front panel; another shielded wire will return from the control to the grid of the modulator tube.

     I had a bad moment when I realized I don't own a 1/2" Spintite driver to tighten the nuts of the 1/4" jacks.  But I do have a perfectly good modern Klein nutdriver that size.

     My workbench is a little chaotic at present.

     As usual, tools have outstripped tool storage and projects have grown to take up the available space.  There's everything from the remains of an old soldering-iron control box and a balanced-line transmit-receive switch that didn't work out (not enough power supply for the relay!) to my QSL-40 transmitter, a box of pegboard hooks and big piece of un-etched PC board.  Somewhere over on the left is a jack box for the CW transmitters (half of them have the key jack on the back, some have heathen connectors that decent folk would never use instead of proper 1/4" two-circuit jacks) and a narrow audio filter.

ON THE PROJECT FRONT (TRIPLETT 666-R VOM)

     I finally downloaded the manual for my (obsolete) 666-R VOM -- Triplett's product support is quite good! -- and loaded batteries for the ohmmeter function (2 AAs and a C).  This puts one more meter on my bench for the ongoing Stancor 10P transmitter project, which has been considerably slowed due to lack of time and energy.  The 666-R is the smaller version of their 630; only 1000 Ohms per Volt but a good, solid meter, well worth owning.  It has the same single range control setup as the larger meter:

     The meter leads are, as you might expect, much newer.  I love old meters but old insulation can ruin your day.  (I'm rebuilding a set with super-sharp phonograph-needle tips, something very useful that you absolutely cannot find today.  Mind you, replacement needles for your Victrola are out there, but the once-common test probes with tiny pin-vise chucks for them are no more, probably because of some kind of product liability issue.  Fluke does make some very sharp add-on probe tips, at least.)

    For the Stancor 10P transmitter, I'm bidding on some more plug-in coils of the 50 Watt, end-linked variety that, if I win them, will help a lot with being able to put it on the 80 and 160 Meter bands.  Finding the end-linked ones has been slow; I have coils for 20, 10 and 5 (!) Meters in decent shape, fixed one for 40 Meters that wasn't, and have a couple more in need of much repair.

     I'm still hoping to put them back into useful shape.  It's slow and fiddly work.

A BRILLIANT SET BUILDER, A BRILLIANT KIT DESIGNER

     "Big Nick," KC9KEP, does amazing work.  He's been building classic late-1930s/early-'40s ARRL Handbook receivers (plus some others) and good-looking as the League originals were, his are even better.  If you like building your own ham gear, he's a inspiration.

     On the other side of the Atlantic and a generation or two more recent in technology, the clever Tim Walford (Walford Electronics) has been turning out very nice kits for some time.  I've built one, a nice 80-meter QRP transceiver, and it was fun to build and fun to use on the air.  He's added an antenna tuner and his answer to the problem of providing a variable inductance is one of the best ideas I've seen.  Go to this page and scroll down to Antenna Matching Unit.  Yes, he's using a short piece of ribbon cable and a set of short traces on the PC board to make a coil!  His notes say that particular solid-wire jumper went unavailable, so he's redesigning it for an alternative coil and I'll be interested to learn what that will be. Good equipment from a good guy.

MODERN 36" PENNYFARTHINGS: COKER AND QU-AX

     At the WARMfest last weekend, I met a fellow riding a Coker Wheelman pennyfarthing, with the same wheel size as my QU-AX.

     Both have similar rake angles, pneumatic tires and the main wheel is a yard across -- but that's about it for similarities:

Coker at left, QU-AX at right

     They're both nice-looking ordinaries and attract a lot of interest.  While the Coker does have a brake on the main wheel, the rider I met admitted he doesn't use it much.  Meeting him made me wish I'd've ridden mine to the event; there aren't so many of us on pennyfarthings, still less the modern versions.

MILLEN 92201 TRANSMATCH JUNIOR

     What's a transmatch?  It's a device for matching a transmitter (or a receiver) to an antenna, or perhaps the other way around.  It's an impedance-transforming network.  They're pretty common in amateur radio and you can even find high-power versions at some MF AM and SW stations.

     This one was made by the perfectionist James Millen Corporation, their "Junior" model (manual for 92201 here), rated at 150W continuous, 300W peak:

     Internal construction is as clever as most Millen devices.  The split-stator input variable condenser sits on top of a little copper-plated box and the input connector is at the rear-wall end of the box.  What's in the box?  A standing-wave bridge, a pair of directional couplers for providing equal-amplitude coupling-value samples of forward and reflected power.  They go to a front-panel selector switch. Set the front-panel meter to full-scale in "Forward," flip it to "Reverse" and adjust the tuning controls for the lowest reading.  Voila, matched!

     (I removed the cover for these photographs.  It matches the front panel.)

     The output capacitor stands on ceramic pillars: both sides are at an RF potential above ground.

     On the back panel, an extra connector!  It connects to a one-turn loop coupled to the main coil (see the manual), and provides a sample of the signal for an oscilloscope or keying/modulation monitor.

     Found on an auction site for a remarkably low price, this example is unrestored.  Typical of Millen products, it is overbuilt and will only need attention if the meter movement or passive components in the SWR bridge (two diodes, two resistors, a fixed condenser or two) are damaged.