Hughes Mitchell X-EC

[WQ9E]

One of the items that followed me home from the hamfest today is a Hughes Mitchell X-EC which appears to be some sort of VFO but I have had no success finding any information.  Can anyone shed some light on this?

It was a VERY wet hamfest but I persevered and found a few goodies including a RCA ACR-136 which should restore just fine, a MC Jone 263 "micro match" and coupler for 50 cents, and a Morris coil winder with all of the standard gears and cams.  I also bought a group of various RME converters along with what I thought was another Meissner Signal Shifter but it turns out to be a Meisner 6 and 10 meter receive converter which I have never come across before. 

Rodger WQ9E

[WB6NVH]

The Hughes Mitchell XEC was an attempt to make a very stable VFO and was  the creation of a couple of employees of the Hughes Aircraft facility in Burbank, California in late 1939.

There are two articles about the prototypes in 1939 issues of Radio, which include the schematics, although neither bear much resemblance to the actual production item.

The manual for this one seems to be impossible to find, I have been looking for a long time.  The XEC's are not all that rare, they show up on eBay about one per year.

Hughes Mitchell seems to have not survived the war.  As far as I have been able to determine, all examples pre-date 1942.  It was in competition with the Meissner Signal Shifter.

[KM1H]

Roger, let me know if you want to get rid of the Meissner.

Carl
KM1H