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Old 21st Apr 2018, 4:41 pm   #34
orbanp1
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Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: London, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 672
Default Re: A relatively cheap portable SW receiver with SSB/CW and analogue tuning?

Quote:
Originally Posted by boxdoctor View Post
Remarkable performance can be obtained from several of the Soviet-made portables, especially those with turret tuners which appear on the usual sales sites now and then. The unfortunate thing is, none (AFAIK) have a B.F.O.. You would have to knock one up to resolve C.W. and S.S.B.. Simple enough to do, though.
...
One such receiver is the VEF-204, VEF-206 radio. (They are electrically the same except for an upgraded cabinet for the 206.):
https://www.petervis.com/Radios/vef-...206-radio.html
The radio was designed in the late '60s and produced throughout the '70s and possibly in the early '80s.

The radio was a very decent performer for its time.
It had a turret style band-selector as Tony mentioned, a separate oscillator stage, stabilized biasing for the oscillator and mixer stages, an RF-preamp, though not tuned like the later Selenas, and an IF-strip with 7 tuned circuits, including a band-pass filter after the mixer stage.

It was such a good radio that there was an article in the early '70s on how to modify such a radio into a ham band monitoring receiver.
The conversion consisted of adding a BFO, changing the AGC circuit to manual gain control, and changing the frequencies for the ham bands. The frequency conversion consisted of just changing the caps in the coil-strips on the turret (the coils remained the same) and removing plates from the variable cap.
(I have a copy of that article.)

Peter O.

Last edited by orbanp1; 21st Apr 2018 at 4:59 pm.
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