The AM Forum

For those that may work on a rig that uses one or more of these critters and need to know what the internal design structure is, go here:

http://www.k5mo.com/Documents/CouplateData.pdf (http://www.k5mo.com/Documents/CouplateData.pdf)

I might point out, that you have to go to the home page first then step through the radio section. If memory serves me, back in the days of TV repair shops, (which I might ad are begining to make a come back!), Admiral had one of these little devices which was of proprietary design. Even in the SAMS Photofacts, it was shown as a box with the leads coming out. Admiral was in the last throws of life and try to gain as much revenue as they could. Eventually, they went out of business. We had a fellow that was pretty sharp working in our shop. He worked for 2 mos. trying to get the right combination that would work between his service calls. I recall the owner got involved too (since he did repairs also). When the customer came in, he thought that his bill was going to be through the roof. But our boss didn't charge him anything  because it became a learning experience for all interested parties. Even some of our component vendors got into the act.

My first slopbucket rig (HW101) had one of those if I remember correctly.

Here's a direct link.

http://www.peacockcollectibles.com/radios2/radios3/pec.htm

Don't you just love the PC-2?  They could have simply employed a regular 2-megohm resistor!

The Globe King 500 used those things expressly to produce hyellowie "communications quality" audio.  After helping Roger, N4IBF(SK) rework his Globe King, I wrote an article in The AM Press/Exchange on how to improve the audio by substituting the couplettes with conventional R-C coupling components.  Don't recall off the top of my head which issue, or whether or not it is posted on the website (http://amfone.net/AMPX/ampx.htm).

The couplette  link should be moved to the Online AM Handbook section.

Those things are rubbish right in the same category as tubes-on-pcboard technology.

BTW I recently acquired what appears to be a decent scanner, and when I get the time, will begin scanning the rest of the back issues of AMPX to post on the website (http://amfone.net/AMPX/ampx.htm) .  I tested the OCR software that came with the scanner and it worked perfectly on a page of text, but haven't tried it yet with the master copy of a back issue.  If the prepackaged "OCR-lite" software doesn't work out, I plan to purchase Iris-10 (made in Belgium), which is affordable and has gotten some good reviews.

Has anyone reading this tried Iris 10, or could recommend other OCR software for about the same price (~$110) that works well with  low error rate? (I'm not too concerned about bells 'n whistles such as the ability to interpret cursive handwriting and exotic fonts).

My fault guys. There is an anomaly when you try to get cute posting a URL.
To highlight a URL I generally use "[url[/url", "[color=[/color", and "[b[/b". (Note: I dropped the "]" bracket to keep it from being active. This seem to work fine under the old board. With the the new board strange things can happen to the URL if you're not careful with how you add the bold and color options. With the URL string I post initially, when you clicked it on, it added a "/b" to the end of the string, causing the string to fail.
If you look at my original string, (Note: I took out the brackets around url and used "end of url") you'll see that it added a "/b" after the htm in the string.
url=http://www.peacockcollectibles.com/radios2/radios3/pec.htm[/b]http://www.peacockcollectibles.com/radios2/radios3/pec.htm[end of url]

The correct string as noted in another message is
http://www.peacockcollectibles.com/radios2/radios3/pec.htm