The CW Position

The primary CW position consists of the Heathkit SB-301/401 combination. The SB-301 receiver is very stable and with the CW filter is quite good for those long winded QSOs' on 40 meters, at 45 WPM nights. I find that my SB-301 is quite sensitive on CW and I use it exclusively for that purpose. The SB-600 speaker has a couple of filters added inside for using it when copying CW/SSB/AM. I find the audio out of the SB-301 needs a little help in the voice modes so I got this unit working with filters on the audio to get rid of some of the extraneous noise in the various modes.

Here is a picture of the SB-301 Receiver and the SB-600 speaker.

The CW/SSB transmitter is the SB-401 which runs at 100 watts output on all bands 80-10 meters. It has a pair of

6146B tubes in the final with 750 volts on the plates and around 300 MA of plate current. The keying is clean and crisp. I haven't had any bad signal reports with it on any of the bands I operate. The unit does SSB at around 200 watts peak and YES I even run SSB sometimes when I want to talk to friends that don't have AM capabilities. The transmitter output goes through a EF Johnson low pass filter and also through a Heathkit SB-610 monitor scope so I can check the signal characteristics on CW and even SSB. As we all know if you aren't monitoring your transmitted waveform things can look good on the meter and be bad on the air. The monitor scope lets you see what you are showing the rest of the world.

Here is a picture of the SB-401 Transmitter and the SB-610 Monitor Scope.

The back-up receiver for the CW position is a Heathkit SB-303. This receiver is all solid state, tunes 80-10 meters

and also has the capability of receiving CW/SSB/AM as it has the same types of filters as the main receiver the SB-301.

I call it the back-up receiver because from time to time I listen on two different bands at the same time if I'm waiting for a

SKED while working some CW buddies on a different band. The receive antenna input for both receivers is fed from a

Mini-Circuits 4 channel power splitter which insures that the signal to both receivers isn't degraded at all.

Here is a picture of the SB-303 Receiver and the SB-600 Speaker which holds the Mini-Circuits power splitter.

The whole CW position station is topped off with the Antenna System. Which consists of an EF Johnson 275 watt

Antenna Tuner, with external SWR/POWER meter which connects to home-brew open wire line feeders, which connect

to a full wave 80 meter dipole at 50 feet. The dipole is actually two dipoles switchable to the feed-line remotely one is

oriented North-South and the other East-West, giving me good coverage for world-wide contacts. The spreaders for the feed-line were made from PVC 1 inch diameter 8 inches long and the spacing for the line is 6 inches. I made a special fixture to drill the holes for the wire, #14 solid, to pass through and also for the positioning wires so the spacers don't move too much.

Here is a picture of the Antenna tuner inside the house.

Here is a picture of the Antenna system, in the Back yard.

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