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Vintage Amateur and Military Radio Amateur/military receivers and transmitters, morse, and any other related vintage comms equipment.

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Old 21st Jan 2009, 1:46 pm   #1
dave walsh
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Default Joystick VFA

Looking at a 1980 advert for the Joystick [and Joyframe] Variable Frequency Antennas in SW Mag, I wonder if any Forum Members ever used these or still have them. I'm sure they go back earlier than the eighties and were re-launched after sales in the 60's? I only ever met one person who knew about them and he didn't seem impressed. They were always relatively expensive [£50/£60 in 1980 when a top range comms set was £300] so I wouldn't have been able to purchase one but they did appear to be a successfull product [Partridge Kent] so where are they all now I wonder?
I've never seen one at a Rally or for sale elsewhere. Just curious. Dave W
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Old 21st Jan 2009, 4:09 pm   #2
dave walsh
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

Further to my first posting, there's little on the web re this but one site refers to a "helically wound" "Broomstick Special" cheap and cheerfull home made antenna [Radio Havana] claiming [a] that the "Joy" stick operated on a similar principle and [b] that the "Broom" stick type definetely does work-interesting!
Dave W
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Old 21st Jan 2009, 5:21 pm   #3
cendoubleu
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

I used a similair idea a few years ago when stuck in a hotel room. Got a broomstick, wound as much wire on as possible, stood it in a corner and hooked up to my rx via a tuner. It worked pretty well, but then that was a third floor room and we were at the height of the last sunspot cycle. Works on the same principle as the helically wound short antenna designs one sees for 160M. Dunno if the Joystick used this principle but probably so. I do remember seeing the adverts though.

Charlie
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Old 21st Jan 2009, 6:52 pm   #4
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

I used one way back in 1972 when I was in a box room bedroom/shack in a rented house. Propped up in the corner with a few feet of wire to it gave me quite a few contacts on Top Band on both AM and morse all around the UK. Certainly not a marvellous antenna but it did work and allow operation in such a radio unfriendly environment. I seem to remember I bought it second hand (or had it given to me) so it probably came out in the 1960s. Not sure what happened to it, maybe I offloaded it to somebody... They were the butt of many jokes, and it was well known it worked pretty well if you put it up on a high mast and fed it with a quarter wave of wire...

73 Dave G3YMC
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Old 21st Jan 2009, 7:21 pm   #5
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

Now thats a blast from the past!!!! I was and I suppose still am a member of the G3VFA (Very fine antenna) club!! I knew the designer and maker of these antennas George Partridge G3CED and a great chap he was, he wanted the G3VFA callsign and the only way he could get it was by a club call, so the VFA club was born, the RSGB was strict about club calls in those days and minutes had to be kept, the club meetings were held in Georges shack in his loft, and many a pint was sunk there!!! he only ever used a Joystick and his list of contacts and QSL cards was very impressive, I used one for years and it enabled me to get out from my terraced house with no garden very well, until it finally collapsed with woodworm (the antenna not the house
The Joystick was wound on wood and so was, as George would say "inherently none resonant" it was infact an end loaded vertical and it did work well he had too many testimonials to deny it, I watched George work W1BB on Topband CW using a Joystick one late night, they were Golden days of Amateur Radio
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Old 21st Jan 2009, 9:19 pm   #6
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

Yeah, I had one. It sat on the top of my Mum's clothes line post and was end fed to my bedroom. It seemed to work OK but I often thought the horizontal wire feeding it did most of the work. Eventually it began to become more banana shaped due to the wooden former rotting away. The wooden former was wound with some pretty hefty varnish insulated copper wire, the same gauge as used on the tuner that you could buy extra if you wanted it.
One end of the wooden former mated with a Grey painted copper tube, probably plumbers water pipe, with the other end capped off with the kind of thing you find on metal chair legs. This pipe was roughly 3 feet long whilst the other end of the former went to similar arrangement but this tube being roughly 5 feet long. The former was around a foot long, the wire making contact to the tubes by fixing screws which also served to hold the tubes to the former. I think the longest tube had a solder tag secured at the end for the feed wire but it may have been a fixed bolt with a wing nut. Hey this was a long time ago! I used it as a young boy to tune the short waves in the days when I was a member of ISWL (Gee!). Anyway, I remember trying to put some RF into it one day but the tuner used solid dielectric 500pF variables which instantaneously caught fire. I like to think I had more fun then than playing with an X-Box all night. The coil BTW was covered in thick Black plastic and when the antenna finally fell to bits, I removed the paint from the copper tubes and used them as earth rods .
I found a very old photo showing the VFA in the garden alongside my ex-Army telescopic mast, actually they are spaced very well apart, the photo distorts the distance. Note that because the line post was steel, the VFA is extended away from it using a length of wood, probably my Dad's hickory stick he spent so long trying to find . Us youngsters then .
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Old 21st Jan 2009, 10:15 pm   #7
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

This is a better, more detailed and amusing response than I expected! Thanks very much all. Perhaps the vulnerability of the wooden part of the Joystick explains the lack of survivors! If it didn't get incineraed by RF power it might just rot. Once that part went, the rest would be vulnerable to being pulled apart I suppose. Ironically the "Broomstick" design uses a 30 cm "Top Cap". The article says it radiates ok [ie without any spontaneous combustion].
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Old 22nd Jan 2009, 3:42 am   #8
Kevin G8FYK
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

Well that's the point - the VFA broom / pogostick was introduced to the gullible at the height of the late 60's early 70's sunspot peak, the likes of which hadn't been seen since the early 50's. And given the much reduced peak levels since then we are unlikely to see that sort of level again in our lifetimes.

But in the days of the Joystick all you had to do was throw a couple of meters of wire out the bedroom window and you would hear the world - I know it for a fact 'cos that's what I used as a teenager to listen to SW Radio Hams on a rapidly modified (e.g. outboard BFO) domestic SW Rcvr.

I even made my own version of the Joystick - 'cos it was too expensive for the teenager that I was then to buy - I got three lengths of 8 foot garden canes seperated by bog roll inserts ('cos I couldn't afford the equiv diam plastic pipe) and then loosely (helically) wound a random dipole of random length slinky style around it. I stood it in the corner of my bedroom and attached it via a three turn link wrapped around the ferrite antenna of the aforementioned domestic shortwave rcvr. At that time (1970/71) I was hearing VK's and ZL's on 20m 5/6 to 5/9 every morning before I had to get up to go to school! Who needs an expensive antenna when the truth is that it's all down to sunspot cycles and propagation anyway?
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Old 22nd Jan 2009, 10:16 am   #9
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

Well that was the general thought at the time, however hearing something on a bit of wire was one thing working it was another!! I see Kevin you callsign is a G8? how come you were working HF on a Joystick in those far of days the secret of a Joystick was infact its weakpoint the wooden core which made the thing low Q and non resonant, so the length of wire attached to it could be tuned to complete resonance with the Joy Match tuner, anyone trying to make one without the wooden core missed out on a result, I did loads of test with and without the pole of Joy on the end of the wire, it worked simple as that I remember this argument raging back in the 60's old George would be laughing in his grave
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Old 22nd Jan 2009, 9:29 pm   #10
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Arrow Re: Joystick VFA

My contribution: photos of the tuner . . .

N.B. The "N" type isn't original - it was fitted when I acquired this item several years ago. I don't know what the original connector was.

P.S. The book isn't part of it! Just a convenient prop.

Al / Skywave.
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Old 22nd Jan 2009, 10:03 pm   #11
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

The tuner I had used the same coil but as stated earlier, used two 500pF solid dielectric caps in a pi configuration. It was of skeleton design, no enclosure, just shaped wire frame to hold everything upright. When the ham ticket arrived I used the coil in the PA stage of a home brew top band rig.
I suppose it makes no difference now (50 years on ) to admit that, yes, I did play with RF before the ticket , but I guess you could put that down to premature self training in the art of wireless telegraphy.
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Old 22nd Jan 2009, 11:33 pm   #12
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Interesting, Les.

As per my photos, I'm having a good look inside mine now. It's a bit difficult - considering the age of this item - to state with any certainty that the variable cap. is original. It's definitely a quality item - ceramic frame at front, brass plates & very smooth in operation. Mind you, the connection to the receiver does state "TX/RX" - and this labelling is original. (Not that I'd care to put too many watts through it! )
Thinking of the solid dielectric fitted in yours, do you know for certain that it was unmodified when it came into your hands? Perhaps Partridge Electronics made more than one type of tuner . .

As for the left-hand side, the rotary switch looks too modern for 1960's vintage, but the front panel calibrations clearly indicate that a rotary switch of some sort was originally fitted in this position - then, of course, there is the solid wiring to the coil from this switch.

There is one little feature of all this that does puzzle me though. I'm 99% sure that the aerial connector - which is an "N" type in mine - isn't original. That's fair enough. The aerial connector is a single 4mm. socket. Therefore, the original socket for the receiver connection must have been an 'aerial + earth' type of affair - in order to get an earth to the tuner / ATU. Could the original have been a common BL type socket?

Al / Skywave.
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Old 22nd Jan 2009, 11:47 pm   #13
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Hi Al, I believe they made a much simpler tuner for the SWL and that is the one I had. The coil was as yours except it did not have the spaced turns nor the smaller gauge winding on the RH side in photo. The taps on the coil were selected using a crocodile clip so definitely fit for receiving only. The taps were made from solder tags being heated and plunged into the plastic, eyelet first. The solder point of the tag was left standing proud and soldered as required to the wire. What I did with mine was to melt a small brass strip with a threded hole in the centre at one end of the former so that the coil could be mounted vertically on a chassis. It worked well and I had a splendid number of contacts on 160m using that coil in the TX Pi-Tank. Happy Days
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Old 22nd Jan 2009, 11:56 pm   #14
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

Well there were a few varieties of Joy Match, SWL and Transmitting types, they were all simple pi tanks, and the antenna connection was a simple connector of some sort, certainly not an N type, the Joysticks were also of different types delux ones were better covered, there was a marine version which was very heavily insulated against the weather and I remember a military version, not sure if it ever got into production, the Joy match did have a problem, they were very sharp on tuning and there was always a mismatch between rx and tx so you ended up having to tweak the thing all the time if the station you were working was very weak, peaking it on receive then peaking it on transmit etc, they were not the most wonderful of devices, (sorry George) but I still maintain they did work
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Old 23rd Jan 2009, 1:01 am   #15
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

Ron G3YUH: Back in those days circa 1969/1971 I wouldn't have dared tried to transmit into any of my h/b antenna's as I knew from my heathcliff /bird's nest /ain't got that so substitute /etc type construction techniques that it would probably have gone up in a puff of smoke! Remember that this was my very early days of Short Wave Listening with a valved domestic rcvr sawn out of the cabinet of an old floor standing radiogram a schoolmate and I had been given (in fact my Dad was rather peeved at having to hand over a quid to my schoolmate's dad, as they ended up with a useless record deck with no amplifier to play it through - the amp of course was in the rcvr, now mine!).

Besides, my Dad had also given me an old broken television and an even older half burnt out MW/LW radio to break down for the components (he was fed up with subbing me for my orders to Electrovalue), so the wire unwound from transformers and chokes was what was used for my receive antenna experiments. I doubt that any of my h/b rx antenna's at that time were anywhere near resonant. ATU's? forget it - I experimented with a variable cap either in series or across the antenna to get the loudest background noise from the said domestic rcvr. Good core skill experiences though for Amateur Radio!

Skywave: Thanks for the pictures of the Joystick tuner, never saw one myself and I'm sure Dave Walsh will also appreciate them.

Top Cap: Didn't we all back then? ("Well you see I had this inverted L antenna with extensive radials and ground spikes which received very well on Top-Band").

(Got my ticket early 1972, just before I left school. Apart from a nondescript ex-army rcvr all my gear including antenna's were home constructed right up to the mid 1980's. I was forced to go over to commercial gear due to on-air comments like 'your deviation's too high', 'you're drifting - not much - but have to bring you back central with the RIT at the end of your overs', 'my add-on spectrum analyser can detect some very low level AM sideband spurii'. So sadly I had to join them. I wonder what these purists would say about the Joystick VFA if it were to come onto the market now?).
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Old 23rd Jan 2009, 9:52 am   #16
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

Same here, though I never gave in much to commercial kit, all my Amateur Radio equipment is either home brew or vintage military, and when I say homebrew I mean everything even down to the Morse key
http://www.atdi24.dsl.pipex.com/more_on_morse_keys6.htm
latest project is my 18set do you remember them?
http://g3yuh.radiotelegraphy.net/18set/18set.htm

Getting back to the old Joysticks I remember one of the failings of the Pole of Joy was after it had been up in the air for a while the insulation which was plastic tape unwound and it flapped in the wind making one heck of a noise! we called them Joy flags, Old George took a lot of stick at the local club he was a great guy he would give you anything, none of the locals paid anything for their Joysticks or feeder, when you visited George you usually came away with something a tuner or some experimental Joystick, great days...
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Old 23rd Jan 2009, 8:25 pm   #17
Geoff G4ICD
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

Quote:
Originally Posted by dave walsh View Post
Looking at a 1980 advert for the Joystick [and Joyframe] Variable Frequency Antennas in SW Mag, .......I wonder if any Forum ............
I've never seen one at a Rally or for sale elsewhere. Just curious. Dave W
Yes I had one in the 60s or early 70s, "A white stick" and tuner box or ATU , sold to me by Henry Radio in Leeds, i used to stick it in the corner of my bedroom plugged into my AR88D or 19 Set, then I bought a "G Whip" mobile antenna for my Codar T28 rx and AT5 tx which my mate Tom G4BUU used to operate when we were mobile in Yorkshire. Both units being helical, but the G Whip was a centre loaded mobile that could be used at home with a counterpoise/radial, all good fun and at least one of them is still alive! www.gwhip.co.uk using the original principles of rf current distribution.
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Old 22nd Apr 2009, 6:02 pm   #18
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

Hi
Found this forum through a search.
Also found via a search fior VE3EIM the details of two copies of a Joystick.
I reckon the wooden dowel could be replaced by a non metallic dowel GRP or fibreglass tube.
i used a joystick when i as a swl in Essex, listening to the shaving club on top basnd with George G3VFA coming in a good signal and a few others in Essex/Medway using the joystick.
I think it would be fun to make one and try it out.
I remember there was also a mobile mount for this to be fiited along the car roof?
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Old 23rd Apr 2009, 7:25 am   #19
M0AFJ, Tim
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

Do you remember G3GAX, G5VZ, G2FSH, G3EGJ and G3OXH every morning 1980kHz?
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Old 23rd Apr 2009, 1:31 pm   #20
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Default Re: Joystick VFA

This is a very interesting thread about this antenna which was the subject of so much derision and scorn back then - Jokestick etc. I had one in the mid-70s, but with a professional reputation to maintain admitted only to having a "whip" on the air. In those days I worked in technical information relating to patents, and I came across George Partridge's patent specification for the VFA. As I recall, the basic idea was that the coil in the antenna, being of very low aspect ratio and hence low Q, was brought into weak resonance at around 14MHz by the mutual distributed capacitance of the upper and lower tubular elements. The low Q meant that the bandwidth covered the shole HF spectrum. This response could then be peaked sharply at any given frequency by the matching unit. On balance I think there is something to the VFA, because at that time I lived in a central London flat and the VFA enabled me to make a lot of QRP contacts that I don't think would have been possible otherwise. I am re-creating one at the moment to see how it goes, and will report results. Maybe we can even get a VFA net going...
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