My Ranger restoration and upgrade

[wa3dsp]

"Even here on the forum: “receiver” spell incorrectly in"


Wow poor grammar or spelling? from the nit picker!

[W2VW]

The best revenge it to buy a Crown Victoria and enjoy it.

[Pete, WA2CWA]

 Even here on the forum: “receiver” spell incorrectly in over 290 posts,

I did notice that spelling/grammatical error in the previous post. No matter. I'm sure you are a gentleman and a scholar nevertheless. 

Al VE3AJM

I always appreciate when someone calls to my attention my grammatical or spelling typos. I've corrected it. Thanks for the support of my original point in the thread.

[KB2WIG]

 I prefer Crown Royal over the Crown Vic.


klc

[wd9ive]

Oh so I left an "s" out, so sorry the reflection is really going to bother me, NOT. The reflection that I would see is a somewhat more positive one, that 98% of the hams out there would never even be able to accomplish what I did on this rig. It just happens that the other 2% are here.

The nice thing about Web publication is that it is dynamic. If it were printed in a publication it is forever unchangeable. So lets say this page is evolving and will have many changes in the future including adding an "s" here and there!

This is exactly the reason that I don't publish any of my work on this site or any other!  You have people that have nothing better to do than nit pick minor things that have no significance to what you have conveyed.  Also, the better ones work is, the more these people look for other things to criticize.   So take it as a compliment that someone had nothing better to do than cut and paste it into Word and look for grammatical or spelling mistakes! 

Jooooe, oh sorry its Joe-GMS       

[K5MIL]

Very interesting article and nice restoration. I just finished working on a very early Ranger. I acquired this one at a local auction for less than a hundred dollar bill. It too was a kit built unit and the wiring was not too bad but I did have to do a bit of clean up work on poor soldering. This unit is before the bias tap was added to the low voltage B+ winding. It did however have the keying mod installed. The voltage for the 6AL5 bias rectifier was taken directly from the low voltage B+ winding. A resistor/divider network consisting of a 150K 2 watt resistor and three 18K 2 watt (paralleled) in each cathode circuit of the 6AL5 was used to drop the voltage to approximately 55 volts. These resistors were mounted on the underside of the keying sub chassis and I believe this may have been provided with the kit as the terminal strips used were the same type used throughout the transmitter. I did add the PTT mod using a 12 vdc relay. A voltage doubler taken from the 6 volt filament supply  was constructed to power the relay coil.  I removed the self bias from the modulators and used a 10K pot to supply adjustable bias. I also replaced the tube rectifiers with solid state, upped the filter capacitors in the HV to two 220 MFD@400 volts in series. That big 20 watt HV bleader resistor was moved above the chassis and attatched to the shield that runs length wise across the chassis. I haven't made any mods to the audio, maybe at a later date. This is the transmitter I coveted when I got my license in 1961, but it was simply way above my price range at the time. SSB was becoming the rage so as soon as I could afford it, the DX-60 was retired and I moved in that direction. Now, all the years later, I finally have the transmitter I always wanted for AM and having much fun chatting with the AMers. The station can be viewed on QRZ.

Bill - K5MIL

[K5MIL]

This is exactly the reason that I don't publish any of my work on this site or any other!  You have people that have nothing better to do than nit pick minor things that have no significance to what you have conveyed. 
Jooooe, oh sorry its Joe-GMS       

Publish you work and bypass the nit pickers, they aren't worth your attention.

Bill

[wa3dsp]

Bill,

  Great on your restoration of your Ranger. It sounds like you did some good things to the old rig. I like your station. It looks like the Ranger has been well taken care of. Your shack looks a lot like my upstairs shack as I have a 32s1/75s1 and HW101 in mine also. My first RX was a Knight Span Master but when I was a novice I had a Knight TX60 and Heath HR10. I have all those old receivers in my mini museum but unfortunately not the originals that I once had.

You mentioned the 6AL5 bias rectifier but you did not say if you changed that to a solid-state device. When you use fixed bias on the modulators it needs to be reliable and the 6AL5 can be a weak point. Not long ago on this forum someone lost a Ranger modulation transformer due to loss of bias. I believe it was blamed on the 6AL5.

You could also get rid of a lot of heat and energy consumption by dumping the big resistor. Replace it with 68K 3W balancing resistors across the series electrolytics on the HV and run the modulator screens directly off the LV supply via the functions switch. The modulator screens should only be turned on in the AM mode. You would need to re-adjust the modulator bias with your pot.  

Thanks for your comments on my restoration. There are many ideas out there on how to do it and hopefully this will give others some more options.

I am picking up another Ranger tomorrow. Someone in our radio club offered it to me for free. I am anxious to see what it looks like.

73 Doug
WA3DSP
www.crompton.com/hamradio

[KL7OF]

Nice job on the ranger....Thanks for documenting it....