Junk or Joy? Heathkit GR-78 Amateur / Shortwave

Figure 1:  The venerable? Heathkit GR-78 receiver, as it was found in flea market.  

What ham can resist the allure of a piece of vintage gear, sans cover, knob, and a part or three, looking ever like the cartoon character with sprigs of pointy hair wires protruding from it, and connected to nothing?  When we go to ham swap ‘n shops, we brace ourselves ahead of time, lest we not load our trunks with the contents of theirs.  We have time in such cases to revisit the vision of our junk corners at home, and the XYL’s displeasure of same.

But …

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Shortwave Weather Faxes with the Ten Tec RX320D

Figure 1: RX320D, by Ten Tec, with “homemade” serial gender changer. Click to enlarge

So, I’d been trying to obtain weather faxes, of the type transmitted by the shortwave weather transmitters run by the US Coast Guard, and do that by using the little Soft66 Lite SDR board.  I’d added a preamp to that line-up in order to improve results, yet it seemed that improvement was needed still. So …

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Using a Pi SBC with Shortwave Radio

Figure 1: The DIP socket in the little SDR board is populated for a BPF.

New Orleans Coast Guard weather fax operates at 4.317 MHz, so it is far outside of the default (7 MHz) filter bandwidth of the little sidecar SDR. Currently, I have no bandpass switching arrangement in the sidecar, so I have to pull and insert different 16 pin dip sockets loaded with the correct components for the BPF for the frequency I’m using.  Yes – that is a little inconvenient …

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