Something old is (re)new(ed) again

So... I decided to go searching in the shed and dig out my old shortwave receiver.

Up, running, & tuned into a local MW NDB

I bought my Yaesu FRG-7700 second hand back in ... what was it, 1996? ... when I was still an electronics technician. At that stage I'd been a hobbyist for many years, with a passing interest in shortwave listening for all that time. When I was a kid I had a Tandy (aka Radio Shack) Science Fair "Three Transistor Short Wave Radio" kit^* which, despite being a finicky regen design with no proper tuning scale (and so to my young mind not a real radio) had fascinated me with its strange languages and odd non-voice signals. Later, as a teenager, I owned an old ex-Army "Reception Set R210" - which, with its calibrated(-ish) dial and SSB reception, was finally a proper radio^**. That set, coupled with a simple FSK decoder kit^†, introduced me to the world of RTTY and WeFax.

(For anyone with a vague feeling of déjà-vu: I've decided to re-work my original few posts & relaunch. I did crap on a lot...)

Fast-forward a dozen or so years, and that hobby had fallen to the wayside - life had gotten in the way, work was (as I now realise) starting to get me down and, since I was living in a flat in the inner suburbs, there was no room for the antenna needed for SWL or an old receiver like the R210 (ex-military sets like that are what gave rise to the term 'boat anchor' for old sets; it's got to weigh 30kg!). As a teenager, I'd drooled over the FRG-7 and FRG-7000 in the Dick Smith catalogue, or the likes of the Icom R-70's & Kenwood R300 & R1000 in magazine adverts - but by the mid-90's shortwave listening itself was on a downturn, Dick Smith (once the big Yaesu dealer in the 70's & 80's) had pretty much dropped all SW & ham gear from their lineup (and had started their downward slide into being another shitty box-mover), and most of the ham radio shops had stopped carrying 'proper' desktop receivers.

I was interested in picking it up again - but since eBay wasn't really a thing in those days, I kept an eye on the local Trading Post paper (note for youngsters: kind of like eBay 'buy it now' - but printed on paper, no search facility, and you mostly payed by cash and picked things up rather than deal with Paypal scams and incompetent couriers). Eventually I found a FRG-7700 a few suburbs away, for sale by a nice old gent whose late wife had used it to listen to radio from back home. From memory I paid $195, complete with a FRG-7700 antenna tuner - I could probably sell the tuner alone now and make back most of what I paid!

The FRG-7700 was launched back in 1981 and, like most sets from that time, was a bit of an anachronism caught between eras. It came along just before the hobbies of SWL & ham radio started dropping off; in the not-too-distant future the Internet would come along and suck up a lot of people interested in technology, overseas news, and communications. Technically, it falls in a strange place as the height of one era's design but totally outdated by the next - it's the first of Yaesu's PLL/VCO receivers (unlike the Wadley loop design of the earlier FRG-7 & FRG-7000) but would soon be outclassed by ongoing improvements in PLL design, cheaper TCXOs, and direct-conversion designs; and (unlike many modern radios) it's completely analogue from front-end to speaker, but with a digital display and (optional) memory unit basically grafted on.

And it's got knobs, not just buttons. Knobs are good...

Despite all that they're not a bad radio even by today's standards. Sure, dynamic range is a bit lower than you might hope for, IM & noise is maybe a bit worse than later receivers, and the choice of filter bandwidths was always a problem for 'professional' listeners - but they still perform admirably. For about 10 years mine lived hooked up to a short long-wire antenna strung along the outside wall of my unit. Hampered by a short antenna in an electrically noisy environment, it still easily received broadcasts from all around the world. With the addition of a home-brewed IF downconverter, I even managed to receive and decode the early DRM (digital) transmissions from Radio New Zealand International and Radio Australia.

However by that time I'd become pretty burnt out on work and left my job, study was taking up most of my hobby time, and after a move or two the radio ended up packed away in a shed. Fast forward to about now, and I've got the time to get back into electronics as a hobby again! Getting the tools and a stock of common/useful/interesting parts together, then building and playing with an arduino, amused me for a few days but got boring pretty quickly ;). Fiddling is fine - but eventually it does need something of a purpose.

So I went into the shed, pulled out the radio, and set about getting it up and running again...

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^* KA9VNW has a fairly complete list of the old Science Fair kits on his website sparktron.com. My radio was kit #28-110. Ah, the memories...
^** I've still got that set, but haven't fired it up in years. Being all valve & HT - and with an unknown 240v mod - it'll need a full going-over before applying power, especially since it's been sitting under the house and is probably full of the large local cockroaches & the even larger spiders that eat them. After all, we're talking about a set where the inside front page of the user manual describes the first aid procedure for electric shock...
^† Designed by the late Tom Moffatt, and released as - I think - an ETI kit back in the early 80's.