Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021
Sometime back I was writing about my new-to-me Hallicrafters SR-400 Cyclone. The radio, as I mentioned, is immaculate — the front panel is as perfect as you could hope for, and the cabinet for the radio and power supply have been powder coated the correct color. In short, it looks fantastic, and it was worth every penny.
The seller had the station listed with a reasonable Buy It Now, and I saw it as my chance to have a really nice example. I’ve wanted one forever, but most sellers had them for sale in auction format, and I wasn’t interested in paying out the nose that way.
The one thing I would like to add to the station is the HA-20, which is exceedingly hard to find (and expensive when you find one). That’s for the future.
In my most recent post about the Cyclone, I noted that when the rig in VOX mode, when I selected CW mode, the radio would go into transmit mode. I spent time pouring over the schematic to see what might be the cause. In standby mode, the transmit relay wasn’t activated when you selected CW mode.
While pondering the problem, I remember thinking to myself, “Self, the Cyclone is acting like the key jack is normally closed when there’s not a 1/4-inch plug inserted.” So the next time I was in the shack, I plugged in a straight key and tested it — lo and behold, the radio no longer automatically went into transmit in CW mode (unless you were in MOX, and even then it wasn’t actual transmit mode until you pressed the CW key).
And to think I had argued with myself about this, thinking “There’s no way that radio has a normally closed key jack! What sense would that make?”
Makes no sense, but that’s the way this radio is. I haven’t checked the actual jack to see if it is actually normally closed, or if there’s a blob of solder or something causing it to go into transmit when there’s no plug in the key jack.
The radio came with a beautiful Night Eagle D-104 with the late model UG-9 stand, and wired with the proper 2-pin connector. I haven’t tried it, but it was nice to get a radio off eBay with a dang microphone for a change, hi hi!
In the next few nights, I would like to check in on my CW traffic net with the Cyclone. First I want to review the complete tune-up procedures, along with checking that the bias is set properly before I get to transmitting.
73 es CUL … de KY4Z …. SK …. SK …. (dit dit) ….