This video has been sponsored by Flexispot. Hello, I'm just back for from a few days trip
to Nevada, where I went to the Nevada ham swap meet. And also I went to visit
my friend John, who has given a lot to the channel. He had more goodies for me.
You might remember John from a previous episode on some mildly radio active tubes he gave me.
John his a power tube expert and he sure makes them glow.
John lives in Nevada, and he is the one who let me know about the yearly
swap meet organized by his friend Brad, also known by his call sign N7RCA in ham circles.
Brad has a large property near Minden Nevada,
which he generously opens up every year for a swap meet. It’s free, no fees, no nothing.
Just show up, it’s all on Brad, and he even allows campers to stay on his property for the night.
Like John, Brad is a tube nut, and he and John have been restoring this incredible
RCA AM transmitter, which is of course full of the giant power tubes that John is so fond of.
And tubes is the main reason I came to this swap meet,
in search of the perfect tube radio I need to put my Model 19 Teletype back on the air.
So after I helped John setup his live Teletype demo, I went around for tube radio shopping.
And sure enough, there were several to choose from, including the two you can get a glimpse of,
on the left here. I ended up buying both, one for me and the other one for John. But
as you will see, I did not stop there, and got even more from ever generous John.
So give me a few minutes to unload this and I'll show you what it is that I all got.
So I had the time-lapse set up all wrong, but you'll use your imagination.
And, let's start with dessert. This is what I was after when I went to the ham fest, is military
radios. It's part of a bigger effort to put my Model 19 Teletype back on the air, as it was when
it was on a ship. And I wanted some period radios. So here's a receiver. I didn't go for the R-390,
which it was probably attached to, but for a more affordable, yet absolutely spectacular, R-388.
The Collins R-388 is a 1950 radio that was designed specifically for radio-teletype operation
rather than voice, with special attention to the required frequency stability.
The radio was both very good and very secret,
with instructions on how to destroy it to avoid it falling into the wrong hands.
And although it fits squarely in the boat anchor category, it is the lightweight model.
It is half the weight of the later R-390, of which there were also a few for sale.
That will come in really handy when we try to stack up all my radio teletype equipment on top of
our new Flexispot desk, the sponsor of today’s video. Spoiler alert, the desk will survive.
You see the tunable thingies at the back. Filters.
Ton of tubes. We don't know if it works, probably not, but those are totally repairable.
And although the 1950s receivers are still barely in the transportable size and weight category,
the tube transmitters of that era are certainly not. So in order to complete the transmission
side, I got a 1980’s transistorized military HF radio, which includes a 100W transmitter.
The idea is to have something that goes cosmetically well with the FSK decoder,
which is going to be a period correct CV-89, and that did just fit the bill.
And to complete our lightweight system, we have the next green box,
yet another donation to the channel from John: a portable MITE teletype.
And those are excessively hard to find. So, this one is a tactical MITE, in its fiberglass
case. And I should be able to get the itsy-bitsy keyboard out. Isn't that cute?
Yes, okay, that did come out. And then... oooh!
The model 19 or 15 teletypes are the
tanks of teletypes. This one is the Swiss watch of teletypes.
Everything is like, super small and super
precision-engineered. So I am told this one actually mostly works.
I hope a little bit is broken, so we can look into it and repair it! But if not we'll just enjoy it.
And in order to put all of that somewhere, we need bench space.
So we got another one of those benches, a Flexispot bench.
As you can imagine, we are constantly running out of bench space,
and last time we reviewed this two-tiered adjustable computer desk from Flexispot.
We ruthlessly repurposed it as a small workbench, which worked really well. I added casters to it,
and it has become part of our ever expanding Apollo coms setup.
This one is the single surface version, comes in several color options,
and would be perfect for the RTTY setup - if it can take the weight of our boat anchors, that is.
I'm getting some slave labor to help me with it [laughter].
This one was even simpler to build than the last one, with only two main parts that needs bolting
together. Warning, this is surprisingly well built for the price and the parts are heavy,
so it helps to have someone else to assemble it. We also added casters to it,
not included in the bench, but quite easy to screw in the 8mm stem receptacles.
Okay. Oh, nice, it's a metal drawer actually.
[Ken] It's a BOT!
[Marc] It's like the other one.
[Eric] It's got a sensor.
[Marc] Oh, it has USB whatever, A and C on there! That's pretty cool.
One of the main selling points of the desk is that it extends all the way up
to a full standing position, although I forgot to demonstrate it this time, but
here is the old footage. However, I am more interested in how much weight it can handle.
[Ken] You can charge a lot!
[Marc] Oh, 54 Watts for the output! [I was looking for] the table rating for
how much we can put on it.
[Ken] That I don't know... 110 pounds, 50 kilograms.
So this is obviously meant for putting your laptop on it, and other portable electronics. And we have
lots of portable electronics! Can you put that on the scale, see how much that is? So that's the
FSK decoder for the teletype, the radio teletype. 44.7 [lbs], so go for it.
That would do it. And then, of course the radio goes with it. 44 [lbs], okay, we're still good!
[Eric] 41.00 [lbs].
[Marc] OK, so we are still not at the limit, right?
And of course we need the Teletype. So that should do it.
40 [lbs]! Okay well we are at 120 instead of 110.
[Ken] 126, so we'll be 16 pounds over.
[Marc] All right, well, we can we can make it a little lighter by taking the front cover off.
There we go.
[Eric] Oh that's so cute!
[Marc] So here's our teletype setup. No problem.
Not a problem! So that's everything you need to receive, but you can't transmit.
In order to transmit, we'll have to add another, I don't know 40 pounds on it.
Oh man, no, that's going to be too heavy! The
table is not going to be able to do it. All right, let's try it.
59 pounds, 60... 60 pounds!
[Eric] That's getting there, isn't it?
[Marc] So now, we are how much are over? We're a good 40 pounds over?
Actually, we have a total of 180 pounds, which is a good 70 pounds over the manufacturer’s stated
limit. Of course one shouldn’t do that, but it’s YouTube, so we did it anyhow,
for the benefit of scientific product review of course.
[Eric] They got design margin!
[Marc] Yep, still works! It's freaking stable. Okay!
So it worked, but don’t do it, and same as last time,
it’s plenty sturdy enough to repurpose for a small workbench. Link in the doodely-doo.
Moving on. This is an automatic tuner that comes with the transmitter. So it was
very very complete. This is an auto tuner, and it will
apparently tune just about anything: it will tune even a very short whip antenna.
Over here, pile of HP equipment, mostly free. That's a storage normalizer. It just
digitizes a slow sweep and holds it in memory,
then displays it on the screen. That was used with the early network analyzers.
This was going to be parted out! So that's sacrilegious for me, so I bought it for
10 bucks they asked for it. And it's a Nixie tube frequency meter and DVM.
So that will go on top of the pile of Nixie tube equipment that I have to restore.
We'll probably do a restora-thon of Nixie tube equipment.
And this is an HP scope that was free. And we tried it, it doesn't work. But there is
there is some life in the tube, and that's what's most important. And there doesn't seem to be
any horizontal life to it, but we'll repair it.
Back here, yet another gift from John.
That's a microfiche reader. So I can quickly access my HP microfiches. We still haven't
found a good solution to digitize them, but John is working on an automated digitizer.
And here was an incredible find: it's the actual tools that the military gave to the technicians.
It's apparently untouched! It has everything in it. All the keys, I particularly like
these. It has all this - if I can get it out - it has all the gauges for checking spring tensions.
There are some small ones, there's some bigger ones, some for every tension needed.
It has the forks, the tuning forks. Tuning fork, show yourself! Tuning fork, there you go.
So that's to adjust the speed of your Teletype. You can't hear anything!
I'll show you how to do that on the Model 15, we'll adjust the speed with the fork.
And, the mighty soldering iron. Over there, I think that's a voltmeter.
Yay!
How cute is that one? Volt and milliamp meter, in
it's little case. I haven't looked at everything, so we'll do an unpacking of that one.
Over here, this is a high voltage power supply. So this is for the upcoming tube work.
And this one, I think, goes to two kilovolts and is reasonably powerful: 100 milliamps. That's a
very early HP unit, it still has the Harrison brand on it, with Hewlett Packard underneath.
And underneath there, is a quartz oscillator. That's a reference, either one or 10 MHz quartz
oscillator. So that's one that I can have on all the time to drive the clocks downstairs,
and not fear that the Cesium runs out. Of course, it's much less precise.
Tons and tons and tons of documentation. So this is all instruments that I have, for which I didn't have the
documentation, and now, I do have it! So lots of scanning in perspective. I won't scan everything
at once, but when I need to repair an instrument, I'll try my best to scan it and make it available.
And finally, over here, there is a whole bunch of stuff. A speaker. That's the microphone for
this guy down here, I think. So this one, I hope it works. But for the price I paid I don't
think it will. So the problem with the power meter is to find the detectors. And these are
the ones that are easiest to blow, because they go only to 10 microwatts. And people
blow them all. So I suspect this one is blown, but for 20 bucks I'll give it a try.
Ah! Morse key, that we're going to use for the Apollo setup in the morse mode.
I think that was quite a good haul, and we're going to have
a whole year of Curiousmarc's videos on it!