Putting the "Mate for the Mighty Midget" Back to Work -- With a DX-100 on 40 Meter AM

After working on it for a while I got so fond of my old Hammarlund HQ-100 that I moved it from the AM/Boatanchors operating position over to a more convenient spot right next to my computer.  This left a big gap on the receive side of the AM station.  

I briefly put my HRO-ish solid state receiver above the DX-100, but I'm afraid that receiver needs some work.  More on that in due course. 

I thought about putting my SOLID STATE Lafayette HA-600A atop the thermatronic DX-100, but this just didn't seem right. The Radio Gods would NOT approve. 

So I turned my attention to the Mate for the Mighty Midget that I built in 1998 and have been poking at and "improving" ever since. 

This receiver worked, but not quite right. It received SSB stations well enough, but when I turned off the BFO I could no longer hear the band noise. I wasn't sure how well the RF amp's grid and plate tuned circuits tracked.  And I had serious doubts about the detector circuit that Lew McCoy put in there when he designed this thing back in 1966. 

As I started this latest round of MMMRX poking, I realized that I now have test gear that I didn't have in 1998:  I now have a decent oscilloscope.  I have an HP-8640B signal generator (thanks Steve Silverman and Dave Bamford).  I have an AADE LC meter. And I've learned a lot about building rigs. 

FRONT END TRACKING

The MMRX has a tuned circuit in the grid of the RF amplifier, and another in the plate circuit of the RF amplifier.  There is a ganged capacitor that tunes them both.  They need to cover both 80/75 and 40 meters. And they need to "track" fairly well:  over the fairly broad range of 3.5 to 7.3 MHz they both need to be resonant at the same frequency.  

McCoy's article just called for "ten turns on a pill bottle" for the coils in these parallel LC circuits.  The link coils were 5 turns.  No data on inductance was given.  Armed now with an LC meter, I pulled these coils off the chassis and measured the inductances of the coils.  I just needed to make sure they were close in value.  They were: 

L1 was .858uH L2 was 2.709         L3 was .930uH  L4 was 2.672

Next I checked the ganged variable capacitors.  At first I found that one cap had a lot more capacitance than they other.  How could that be?  Then I remembered that I had installed trimmer caps across each of the ganged capacitors. Adjusting these trimmers (and leaving the caps connected to the grid of V1a and V2A, I adjusted the trimmers to get the caps close in value.  I think I ended up with them fairly close: 

C1: 63.77-532 pF          C2 64.81 -- 525.1 pF

I put the coils back in and checked the tracking on 40 and on 80/75.  While not perfect, it was close enough to stop messing with it.  

DETECTOR CIRCUIT

I've had my doubts about the detector circuit that Lew McCoy had in the MMMRX.  In his 1966 QST article he claimed that the circuit he used was a voltage doubler, and that this would boost signal strength.  But I built the thing in LT Spice and didn't notice any doubling.  And consider the capacitors he had at the input and output of the detector:  100 pF.  At 455 kHz 100 pF is about 3500 ohms.  At audio (1 kHz) it is 1.5 MILLION ohms. Ouch.  No wonder years ago I put a .1 uF cap across that output cap just to get the receiver working. 

Scott WA9WFA told me that by the time the MMMRX appeared in the 1969 ARRL handbook, the second "voltage doubling" diode was gone, as were the 100 pF caps.  Now it was just a diode, a .01 uF cap and a 470,000 ohm resistor.  I switched to the 1969 Handbook circuit (but I have not yet changed the 1 meg grid resister to 470k -- I don't think this will make much difference).  Foiled again by a faulty QST article, again by one of the League's luminaries. 

6U8s out, 6EA8s in 

We learned that the 6U8 tubes originally called for by Lew McCoy are getting old and not aging well.  So I switched all three to more youthful 6EA8s.  This seemed to perk the receiver up a bit. 

MUTING from the DX-100

My K2ZA DX-100 has a T/R relay mounted in a box on the back of the transmitter.  When the Plate switch goes up, it switches the antenna from receiver to transmitter.  The box also has a one pole double throw switch available for receiver muting.  I put the common connection to ground, the normally connected (receive position) connect the ground terminal of the AF output transformer to ground -- it is disconnected from ground on transmit.  The other connection (normally open) is connected to the antenna jack -- on transmit this connection ground the receiver RF input connection.  These two steps mutes the receiver very nicely. 

Replacing Reduction Drive

Over the years I have had several different reduction drives on the main tuning cap.  I had a kind of wonky Jackson brothers drive on there that needed to be replaced.  I put in a new one -- this smoothed out he tuning considerably. 

Ceramic Resonator

I never could get McCoy's 455 kc two crystal filter to work right.  So at first I made due with the two 455 kc IF cans.  This made for a very broad passband.  Then I put a CM filter in there.  This was more narrow, but with a lot of loss.  There may have been others.  But the filter spot is currently held by a 6 kHz wide ceramic filter.  This one is my favorite so far. 

Digital Readout

When I was running the DX-100 with the Hammarlund HQ-100 I built a little frequency readout box.  The box was from a Heath QF-1 Q multiplier (I am sorry about this).  The readouts are in Juliano Blue and come via e-bay from San Jian.  I now have it hooked up to the DX-100's oscillator.  I haven't tapped into the MMMRX's oscillator yet.