Radio Reinvention

 What is happening at the ARRL?     Taylor Swift -- not a ham yet! Late last year (just several days ago) I heard some grousing on 40M about things are changing with the  ARRL and QST. It was not totally clear to me until N2CQR sent me a link to a ham blog in Ireland. The heart of the matter is the content delivery process and a significant price increase.   https://ei7gl.blogspot.com/2023/12/arrl-raise-membership-fees-as-numbers.html In essence the bargain delivery price is about $10 more than 2023 and available only by download and no hard copy.  Hard copy versions delivered at premium mail pricing have a huge price increase.   Hidden  in the piece is  critical info for us. The old cost was about $49 a year and a 10K loss of members in 2022 is inching towards a loss of $490,000 in sales. That was surely noted by their Far East Advertisers Bankroll Group. If only 10% of that lost 10K group (about 1000) bought a new radio whose average price...

Update 12-31-2023. The last day of 2023. What better way to finish the year than to think about older boat anchors and how they can be rejuvenated to work on today's bands. Spending a better part of each day at the hospital where the only TV service is standard TV with the stupid quiz shows and of course HGTV, you basically go nuts. Quite often the OL is asleep and so not much to do but think about how to replace the drifting and non-linear Analog VFO's in boat anchor radios. No time to build stuff but lots of thinking time. One of my favorite radios is the Hallicrafters SR-160 (right along with the SR-150 which I don't have). But it suffers from a drifting  and NON-Linear VFO.    Based on my success with the Triton II, I asked why can't we do the same with the SR-160 (or National NCX-3 or even a SWAN 240). Well I think it can be done!   The SR-160 used the old trick of a higher frequency VFO @ 9 MHz with a 5.2  MHz IF. Subtract the IF from the VFO and you get 7...