Browning and Tram carrier-control kits. No joke. Soon.

[2600]

Whoa! Hadn't paid attention to how long since my last visit here. The word "busy" is way overused, so I'll skip it. But below is part of what I have been doing instead of forum lurking.

This is a cross post from WWDX. Had some folks on this forum who want this toy, too.

So, here is an open letter, sorta.

To? That would be all the poor schmucks I promised to sell this toy in the form of a D-I-Y kit.

Like, for the last year or three.

Never mind the excuses. This thing is so easy to install * wrong * that I insist on soldering every wire that I can before it's packed up to ship. This leaves only the wires that must be passed through a hole before they can be soldered.

So, you ask, why not just put plugs on a wiring harness and sockets on the circuit boards?

Good question. Mostly I just don't trust plugs.

Or sockets. When I'm tempted to go this route, I just think about the immense fraction of my career spent dealing with connector faults of all kinds.

Yes, I could just throw some wire in with the circuit boards and the control, tell you how long to cut and strip them, and show you where they go.

That is what we generally call a "support nightmare" in the making. Every wire the installer must connect becomes one more thing that can go wrong. Only takes one wire in the wrong place to keep it from working.

Up to now, the only folks I have shipped "DIY" versions of this thing had a very-important advantage.

Well, maybe two of them. First each of them has a clue. Second, they each have a "crib sheet" radio on hand to copy from. That would be a radio we had installed the setup into and he took home from here working. If the guy has a problem, he always finds that the newly-installed setup really doesn't look just exactly like the radio that DOES work properly. The fix is no trick to figure out once he spots what's "different" in the radio that won't work right.

Besides, every time we get serious about packing these things up as kits in any numbers to ship, a dozen or so radios show up out of the blue and 'POOF', those kits are all gone. After installing 400 or more of these the last 20-plus years, it takes less labor to install it in a radio than it does to test the board, configure it, pack the kit, check for accuracy and write up the order to ship it out.

Well, maybe. Seems like it, anyway.

Time to start over. We're nearly halfway through building a batch of fifty. With any luck, this will permit filling all the back orders before it runs out.



Now it's time to haul out the "test" D201A and hook up the completed boards to it, one by one. Building this board leaves room for error, too. And I won't ship one of these before I see it control MY radio like it's supposed to.

To everyone who has been continually waiting for this, please accept my gratitude for your patience.

Can't be long now.

73

[jacobs132]

just curious, and excuse my ignorance. what is it, that this kit does?

[thehobo]

i believe its in the heading?? carrier control kits.. like me i had to think about it before i reread the tital?? looks like when a person reaches a certian age most reasing goes out the window?? lets see were was i?? lol.. thehobo

[2600]

A traditional limitation of tube-type base radios is a need to control the carrier power.

No good reason for this other than to suit the needs of an amplifier. Linears tend to over-amplify the radio's AM carrier, and under-amplify the modulation peaks. This will reduce the modulation level you hear at the other end, and at worst will introduce a "tight" distorted sound to the audio.

The cure for this is the reduce the radio's carrier power. So long as the radio's peak modulated power stays the same, this will restore the balance between carrier power and peak power that the radio had before the amplifier was turned on. This improves the audio quality coming out of the amplifier.

Modern-day (like, since 1980) solid-state radios can do this trick with only simple modifications.

Tube radios do not have the circuitry built in to make this as easy.

And that's what this trick does, is to add a feature to a tube-type transmitter that any Cobra 2000 or Galaxy Saturn provides much more easily.

73

[jacobs132]

thank you. looks like a good modification to me.