[Today’s run: 7.2 miles with wife]
I worked some more on the 1930’s vintage Hallicrafters SX-11 receiver today. In the end I decided to declare victory and I put it on the shelf.
The receiver covers from the AM broadcast band through 30 mHz in 5 bands. It has noticeably less sensitivity on one band. I tried a number of remedies but could not get around that issue. It doesn’t appear to be any of the easily accessible parts. I decided I did not want to tear it all apart or do some wholesale part swapping just to get that band working.
One factor in my decision was a lack of information. I don’t know how well it would should work, other than the single band problem. If I had some experience with similar equipment I might know when to stop, so to speak.
The controls on the SX-11 seem to work, but they don’t crisply accomplish things, not like the controls on a modern radio. Also the frequency dial is a rough-guess at best. On most of the bands 1-kHz is covered in about an inch of dial space, about a quarter of one turn of the main tuning knob. There is a second tuning knob for finer work, but the display is not calibrated, so your true frequency is somewhere plus or minus 500 kHz from what the dial says.
Yes, I was able to find some CW on 20 meters. But if there had not been signals there to hear, I would have never known where I was. The BFO seems kind of squirrely too. It sort of works. Maybe it could be “repaired”. But the few things I tried did not accomplish much.
It does do a good job on AM broadcast stations and AM shortwave. They come in clearly and sound good in the speaker.
Given all of that, I am happy I got it working to some degree. I don’t think I will be using it much in normal ham radio operation. So I stopped before I broke something and I put it in a display position in my ham shack.
It may be that I’ll someday get a chance to hear another one of these and discover that this one could be improved. If that happens I may dive in again.