10-4 Good Buddy! - A Slider for Your Novice Transmitter
Executive Summary In my on-going effort to write more and more about things of interest to fewer and fewer people, consider this. Good VFOs for vintage-crystal controlled transmitters are popular and scarce. I'm putting together a vintage station for a winter QTH, and after a summer hamfest shopping spree, I found and fixed a Drake R4C receiver and 2NT transmitter. So the search was on for a suitable VFO for the 2NT. A chance garage sale encounter with an old Siltronix CB "slider" suggested there might be some easily converted vintage VFOs out there. Turns out the Siltronix 90 has a lot of great features, and is easily converted to a 7 mHz VFO. It drives the 2NT fine on 40 through 10 meters, despite having lower output than Drake suggests is needed. I expect the modded Model 90 will work well with other vacuum tube transmitters, but may well require another buffer stage or an unun for increasing its output voltage. What's Good About a Siltronix Model 90? W...