Yesterday I got a nice e-mail from Boulder Colorado about Yardley's very early SSB rig. I'm guessing that the 4.7 MHz is a typo -- it might have been 3.7 and 14 MHz. FB. Thanks Mike
Bill,
Yardley Beers W0JF moved to Boulder in the early 1950's to work at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) laboratory. There he headed the Time and Frequency Division, which maintains the atomic clock. He later taught at the University of Colorado and Denver University.
About 1955 he homebrewed what, at the time, may have been the only SSB transceiver in the world. It was built with individual transistors (no IC's in those days) and Yardley had to grind the crystals himself for the filter. He enjoyed naming his radios and this one was "The Black Rose."
The transceiver ran at 4.7 and 14 MHz. Its 1/2 watt output was fed to a home built amplifier. The transceiver demonstrated the practicality and benefits of SSB in a world where AM was the voice mode.
In the year 2000 Yardley demonstrated this original, old SSB transceiver to the Boulder Amateur Radio Club by using it to make contacts with two club members. Attached to this e-mail are a couple of photos.
73,
Mike W3DIF
Treasurer, Boulder Amateur Radio Club (BARC)
. The delay time for the signal to return is about one seventh of a second, so there is plenty of time for your transceiver to switch to receive mode. When you have found and peaked an open round-the-world path, call CQ, and you may be rewarded with DX anywhere along the path. Also, the question of Long-path and Short-path does not arise – you are transmitting on both paths at once, giving you a greater chance of catching the other station’s beam direction….
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