Figure 1: An almost forty year old Alda 103A amateur band transceiver. Click to enlarge.
The Alda 103 has a very interesting history. It was manufactured (IIRC) in 1977 and 1978, which means it has a nice complement of the discrete bipolar transistors that are fairly common (now, almost 40 years later) – and thus replaceable. Readers of some of my other articles may have observed that I like to have the ability to fix …
For the curious, my Alda 103A rig is on youtube:
Figure 1: The cloud warmer for eighty meters. Click to enlarge.
So, on eighty meters my signals were always in the dust. In the fall season, with thunderstorms hundreds of miles away, I had an S6 static noise level, with crashes above that. It was enough to drive me back to the forty meter CW band. The problem was twofold. First, I had a very “loaded” 80 meter attic dipole, and secondly, it was a dipole. Hence it was poor to begin with (being both loaded and in the attic), and a great static noise scooper (like all dipoles are).
WB8LZR 