Recycling at its Best

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

All this talk about dumpsters and old stuff seems incomplete without covering the recycling angle.

Spent today out in the driveway here with Joe/PJP stripping down a Gates BC-1T before the carcass headed to scrap. This is the transmitter offered a couple weeks back by Wilson/W4BOH. Joe had been looking for some iron for his homebrew transmitter project and some of the iron in the Gates fit the bill, so they made a deal.

Wilson met us for breakfast this morning at the Wilton Grill (downtown hotspot & AM hangout in the area) then followed us here for the nickel tour of the station before dropping the transmitter in the driveway. That was around 9:30.

Just after 11AM we had the beast torn down and were ready to load the sheet metal and other scrap into my truck for deposit at the local trash/recycling depot. Included were a couple of 300G panels picked up from W2ILA a while back that were also stripped finally.

Not a bad morning's work. The BC1-T is an interesting transmitter in its design: incredibly well-made and thought out in some ways and amazingly cheap and shoddy in other areas. Many have no doubt hit the scrapper in the last few decades. At least this one will live on through its parts.

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

A few more....

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

Fortified with Iron.

[W3GMS]

Todd,

I have one of those CG309's and its a beast!  Gave one to the Tron years ago after he had the fire trying to help him build his next big rig. 

Its a shame nobody bought the 1T to use it as is on maybe 160.  At least Joe got some good parts out of it and that's good. 

Joe, GMS 

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

Well, the CG-309 wasn't part of the Gates deal but something I got back in the 90s and had here for a later HB project. Knowing that Joe needed it and that changes here will likely keep me from using it, I gave it to him along with some Johnson 833 sockets & finned caps. He got my NOS RCA JAN 833As a year or so back, now he has the rest. He's building a rig with them this winter. It's such a cool transformer visually. Was tough to see it go, in a geeky-eye-candy sense.

The BC1-T probably could've been returned to service, but not without considerable work. Along with the typical broadcast kludges, it had been stuck by lightning at least once by the looks with a lot of damage remaining. That's perhaps why the plate iron was replaced with the Dahl xfmr. Overall it was a mish-mashed mess inside with rat's nest wiring added and is probably serving better as a donor. Not a particularly loved or scarce model. Wilson only had two queries about it, one being Joe. So no one was beating down the door to save and convert it, despite the good price. Replacement cost of the Dahl plate iron alone from the company who bought Dahl out (Harbaugh?) is $850. 

[W3GMS]

Well, the CG-309 wasn't part of the Gates deal but something I got back in the 90s and had here for a later HB project. It's such a cool transformer visually. Was tough to see it go, in a geeky-eye-candy sense.

Just remember that I have a CG-309 should you need it someday.  Who knows if I will do anything with it or not.  As mentioned, I gave one away to the Tron years ago and then I had to rescue this second one from the dumpster so these just seem to show up here from time to time.  Every time I pick up one, they get heavier and heavier!  The last haul we used an engine host to get it in the back of the truck and that worked pretty well.   

Joe, GMS

[kb3ouk]

Something tells me if I tried to put one of those CG309s in my truck, I'd probably have the front end up in the air!

[KA3EKH]

Back about ten or so years ago I had a Dodge Ram charger, huge ugly truck SUV thing but had the ability to get in and out of every transmitter site with ease. I bought some weird type of hoist with a boom and winch and cable on it at a county auction and installed in in the back of the truck so I can pick up transformers from a dolly and load them in and out of the truck. Had a lot more transmitters with tubes back then and would end up replacing a plate transformer at least once a year. At one transmitter site the whole area around the transmitter was way overgrown and the transmitter building was located about a thousand feet down a dirt road thru the woods. Another engineer and I were sitting around out there one day complaining about how hard it is to see the entrance at night and having the rig in the truck had an idea. We loaded up an old three phase plate transformer that must have weighed at least five hundred pounds on the truck and took it down to the end of the driveway, dropped it there and then painted a huge florescent orange arrow on it pointing to the driveway. Everyone who saw it loved it, other people had mailboxes or stupid things like that but who else had a huge transformer. After a year some SOB came by and stole it, not an easy thing to do considering what it weighed and that it was sunk in the mud maybe six inches so after a couple months I put a second transformer out there and within a month that disappeared too. have no idea how anyone can lift something that heavy without a lot of help and yea I know it has copper in it but have you ever tried striping one of those things? I still have one site where the pole at the gate to the transmitter site rotted away and I placed an old MW-5 plate transformer there with a chain thru the laminations that goes to a padlock to lock the gate. No one has stolen that one yet. You just can’t have this kind of fun with parts from a solid state transmitter but its way better on the back.

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

Joe, thanks for the offer - I will file that away as I really hated to see this one go. Big changes here dictate it, though. With PJP in need of one it was the perfect opportunity to send it to a good home, though getting it up into his truck was interesting. He had one of these some years back along with a CVM-5 which he loaned to a local Long Island ham but never got back. So this fills most of the gap.

IIRC, didn't the transformer you gave to Tron end up making a rather fast, gravity-assisted trip back to mother earth initially? 

[WBear2GCR]

... transmitter killers! 

                        _-_-

[W2NBC]

Todd,

I can relate to the BC-1T teardown.. Below is a pic from Dayton 2006 that Tim WA1HLR, Thom KA1ZGC, and I in Tim's words "shucked like an ear of corn" a BC-1T in less than an hour.. That's everything.. bolts, nuts, logos.. It's then you can really get to see that the transmitter was really a cabinet with some 'parts' thrown in..
But some of those parts ROCK!

[Bill, KD0HG]

My homebrew 304 rig uses a Dahl plate supply tranny salvaged from a junked BC-1. It hardly gets warm. First-rate iron that's not made today, nor will it ever again.

Bill

[KL7OF]

from prevoius "transmitter killing" operations...That's a Gates 500 on the hook...10 kw mod iron on the truck bed and stripped racks from gubmit 50 mhz Aurora transmitters...

[W3GMS]

IIRC, didn't the transformer you gave to Tron end up making a rather fast, gravity-assisted trip back to mother earth initially? 

Hi Todd,
Yep, you remember correctly.  We tried sitting it on the back floor and it went right through to the ground!  We got some framing lumber and made sure it would not fall through on the way back up to HLR mountain!
Joe, GMS
 

[kb3ouk]

What was he trying to haul it in? The Cadaverlac?

[Opcom]

... transmitter killers!  

                        _-_-

 - Deeds done in darkness.
 - Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap.
 - Please forgive me for what I do for I know not what I've done.
 - It's the cost of our endless needs, idle thoughts and wicked deeds.
 - Wicked seeds of desperation - Evil deeds that breed temptation

Something tells me if I tried to put one of those CG309s in my truck, I'd probably have the front end up in the air!

No worries! I have the older version/ham version. One winter I put it in the trunk of a '74 Pontiac Ventura to improve traction on icy roads. The Ventura is secretly a Firebird hiding in a conservative body.

The 309 is a great piece of iron, regardless of how people dis-resepect it due to it being old-style or not well-suited to the ease of C-input electrolytic stack filters.

PA0309 has the same secondary but fewer primary taps. page says 105/115/220/230, but I think they mean 210 instead of 220. what's 10v among friends?

PA-309 case for comparison to the CG-309:

[Opcom]

Todd/Joe, would you mind measuring the DC resistance on the CG-309?

The PA-309 read:
66 Ohms -entire 7000V winding
56 Ohms -entire 6000V winding
44 Ohms -entire 4800V winding

115V windings were too low to check w/ meter at hand, but less than 0.1 Ohm as the last digit stayed at .0

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

I no longer have it, Pat. It was the newer style of course, but if rated the same should read pretty close I'd think? One of the two Joes, PJP or GMS could likely check for you as time allows.

Jeff: your BC1-T actually looks/looked clean in comparison! The one we tore down was beat to snot inside and out. But yes - they do yield a surprising wealth of good parts considering the 'empty box' appearance. I ended up with much of the hardware and a couple cool crystals along with the thick plexi-window, door stop, and a few other trinkets. That door stop/arm is quite a piece of work.

Steve: we could've used your digger for moving the cabinet. We hefted it up into my truck and had to heave it over a 4 or 5 foot railing into the scrap metal dumpster below.

Also, that mod reactor looks awfully familiar. Pretty sure I have the same model sitting in the garage with the 21E. And I'd still love to get my mitts on one of those mil racks.

IIRC, Joe will be offering that Dahl plate transformer for sale at some point as he'll be using the CG-309 instead. Wilson said the company that bought out Dahl will still make them, 2 weeks and $850 plus shipping. Ouch!

[W3GMS]

Todd/Joe, would you mind measuring the DC resistance on the CG-309?

The PA-309 read:
66 Ohms -entire 7000V winding
56 Ohms -entire 6000V winding
44 Ohms -entire 4800V winding

115V windings were too low to check w/ meter at hand, but less than 0.1 Ohm as the last digit stayed at .0

Pat,
Give me a day or so and I will get you all the resistance readings on my CG-309.
Joe, W3GMS

[KA3EKH]

Speaking of transmitter killing, this is a Harris MW-5B that I squashed up with a backhoe. Considering what a huge pain this particular transmitter was being that it never sounded right, would always fail on Friday nights or holidays and was in one of the dirtiest, badly lit, snake infested cheapest built cinderblock and plywood shacks imaginable I considered killing it the best days work in a long time that I have done. Did have a couple other MW-5 as backup in other sites so did strip it first.

[W3GMS]

Todd/Joe, would you mind measuring the DC resistance on the CG-309?

The PA-309 read:
66 Ohms -entire 7000V winding
56 Ohms -entire 6000V winding
44 Ohms -entire 4800V winding

115V windings were too low to check w/ meter at hand, but less than 0.1 Ohm as the last digit stayed at .0

I just measured the secondary winding resistance of my CG-309.  Here are the values measured:

7000V 57 ohms

6000V 48 ohms

4800V 37 ohms

All reading taken with a Beckman 320B

Joe, W3GMS

[Opcom]

Thanks! My meter is an old side-pushbutton Fluke, not calibrated/checked for Ohms in 20 years. Kitchen drawer DMM.

[W3GMS]

Thanks! My meter is an old side-pushbutton Fluke, not calibrated/checked for Ohms in 20 years. Kitchen drawer DMM.

Your quite welcome.  I would have to use a Milli-ohm meter for the primary values.  Much fewer turns and much larger wire gauge resulting in very low ohmic values. 

I always had this transformer slated for a pair of 4-1000's modulated by a pair.  The ultimate big rig at least for me.     

Joe, W3GMS

[Opcom]

I'd have to agree on size alone. The catalog ratings are CCS. The spiel indicates it should be good for much more.