Project of the week:

The idea of this page is to show what project is going on this week ( or month) , hope to update it frequently.

Dayton purchases:

M151A1

Just bought it, what more can I say. The perfect accessory for the "green" radio, more to come soon.

Collins 618S1/4 Transceiver

The 618S1 project is number one on the runway at this time. Have been working on this for about two years and spent untold amounts of money.. Now have the 618S transceiver, proper control head with mating plug and a 180L3 antenna tuner. All the voltages are provided by a 28 volt 15 A power supply along with a GE master power supply that provides the 250, bias and switched 250 and 600 volts for the transmitter. the entire system is installed in a 19" equipment rack along with a companion ARR-41 receiver.

Everything in the back of the receiver is tied to four terminal strips that are attached to a panel that mates with P301 and P302, the Amphenol connectors were salvaged from a old Dumont scope.

The T connector and elbow are copied from the installation on the Independence, Harry Truman's C-118, If it was good enough for Air Force One its good enough for me.

Close up of the transceiver so you can see the home built rack rails.

DAV Transceiver

Back in the seventies when I was in High School I bought a DAV from Fair radio sales for around $25, think I sold it for about the same amount couple years latter. did not give it much thought at the time. I had a TBX 4 transceiver that I operated for a couple years including one year at Dayton for the 3885 net but the last couple years I have been using others rigs, a BC-611 and last year a MAB transceiver so now have decided that I need a WW2 transceiver for the nets at Dayton and MRCA so set out to get another DAV With the advent of EBay a fool and his money are soon parted.

This radio came with several problems, first who ever worked on it in the past managed to burn out all the receiver tubes. they used all the same color wires on the battery pack and hooked the B+ to the filament string. So first step was to round up all the tubes I needed. Second I discovered that the IF input transformer was open. after asking everyone I knew did finally find a replacement radio deck.

This is the RF deck for the DAV, looks a lot like the MAB only with a couple other connections to support the DF capability. Third had to replace several of the capacitors due to high amounts of leakage. In the DAV the only thing that turns on and off is the filament string. The B+ and screen voltage are always applied so if their is any leakage it will kill the batteries.

A schematic of the MAB transceiver, not exactly the same as a DAV but close enough to get a idea of what's inside, Thanks to KA3AIS for the schematic, K4CHE for the tubes and Al, N3FRQ for the MAB RF deck.

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