Listening Around Eighty Metres

In an article written for AOR UK, the AR7030 was coming in for some criticism.

They said it was hard to operate. Really? It's true that it is Menu Driven and the approach is different from a traditional radio, but if we go back a bit.

Nothing could have been simpler than a crystal set. All you needed to do was wind a coil, make a tuning capacitor from individual plates you made earlier and hope you found an active area on the crystal with the cat's whisker.

The first valves made it easier. Do all the above, connect the crystal to the grid, put a pair of headphones in the anode circuit and all you have to do to hear anything is set the filament current and the grid bias. Add another winding on the tuning coil for positive feedback and you can triple the gain and do away with the temperamental cat's whisker.

Real progress, as long as you don't mind getting the phase of the winding right, setting the Regeneration, retuning slightly and hope to keep the system stable by constant monitoring of HT, LT and bias.

Superhets standardised the receiver design leaving us free to try different control technology.

If this means nothing to you, it's just the jargon of it's day. Now, the AR7030 is so highly developed it needs digital control with all its buzzwords, not only to get the best from it but also to meet your expectations. And it will - once you get used to it.

Quote Unquote - Heard On Eighty Metres

Forty years on, your scribe still takes pleasure from a daily trawl across 80m.

...can't get out to give you a reading from the rain guage. It's too wet...

...you are five and nine plus. Real arm-chair copy. Great audio. Did not catch the callsign...

...aerials? The perfect garden for me would be 1 foot wide by 132 feet long...

...the rig is a Kenwood 570. That's an Icom 570...

...G8 is a novice call, isn't it...

...I call it a quad because it's a loop with three sides...

...I've got two children and seven koi carp...

...getting QRM from the dog...

...just because I asked for breakers does not mean you can come in...