Saturday, Aug. 13, 2011 — I’m listening to an 80-meter roundtable in the wee hours of Saturday morning — not on my ham rig, but on my Lafayette HA-350 receiver.
I picked up this receiver on eBay sometime back — kind of a fluke because I got it way cheap. It’s not pristine, but it allegedly worked. I have a Lafayette HA-350 that doesn’t work; it needs to have the power supply caps replaced — a job I started about 4 years ago. At least now I have a “live one” to compare it to, lol!
Actually, the HA-350 was nothing short of a true surprise — I have it hooked to 10 feet of wire, and its a surprisingly hot receiver. From its pedigree, it should be hot.
The receiver was built for Lafayette by Trio Kenwood in Japan; it features a true product detector and crystal filter. It’s hard to believe just how stable this receiver is, too — once its warmed up, its drift is negligible. It’s less than the Hallicrafters SX-130 in the library, and about the same or slightly less than the BC-348Q in the library.
I need to finish up the recapping of the other HA-350, then I’ll shed one of them (at least). The exterior looks pretty good; but the chassis has quite a bit of rust. The other HA-350 looks better under the hood; of course, it doesn’t work yet, either!
The HA-350 is missing a couple of features I wish it had … 1). selectable filtering (it has a fixed crystal filter that works, just not narrow enough for CW); and 2). a lower tuning rate. The tuning is so fast it would be nice to have a vernier built into the dial, along the same lines as the dual-rate tuning dials on the Swan transceivers. Fine tuning SSB isn’t a horrible deal, just a bit touchy.
All-in-all, I can’t complain. It receives well, audio is excellent and hum-free, and its stable. Can’t say that about many of the tube rigs in my shack!
-30-