Among other things this week I have been conducting focus groups as part of a risk management process so after a day of this it is always good to spend some quality time at the repair bench. The first project was a Johnson Navigator which is a very cute 40 watt CW only transmitter. It has a differential keyer circuit that produces a nice sounding chirp free signal. It needed new filter caps, cleaning and lubrication of the VFO reduction drive, and I had to rebuild the meter movement. It is now working as it should and has been on the air for a few contacts. It will be permanently paired with a Hammarlund HQ-150 receiver. When warmer weather gets here I am going to repaint the cabinet to take care of some scratches and hopefully I will have found a complete matching set of screws for the front panel.

Project 2 was pretty simple, a Drake RR-3 receiver shown here sitting on top of its older brother MSR-2. The RR-3 is very similar to the amateur R-7 internally and covers from 10 Khz. to 30 Mhz. in 500 Khz. ranges. It needed switch and control cleaning but otherwise worked fine. Of course right after I finished the dial lamp died so it will be replaced with an LED. The RR-3 is a nice receiver but the MSR-2 strikes me as being of slightly higher construction quality. But both do a fine job on all modes.

Nice! Those two Drakes look FB together.

Thanks John. I like the panel color and the receivers do go well together. But the RR-3 band/frequency range knob color is better suited to the civilian R-7 since the markings on the translucent plate don't stand out well against the tan/cream color background. I didn't realize the default frequency setting for the ranges is different on the RR-3 (from my R-7) until I started using it since the knob markings don't stand out like they do on the R-7/TR-7 front panel. With the RR-3 you have to use the up/down buttons to select an amateur band.

The Aux-7 board is standard in the RR-3 and came with modules and individual crystals for 500 Khz. and 2.182 Mhz. Drake literature notes that this board provides an easy method of having the receiver come up on a specific band at power up but I think the up/down range buttons will suffice for my needs

The only thing it needs is a SL-300 or SL-500 CW filter since it came with the SSB filter and I already had a spare SL-6000 AM filter.

Rodger WQ9E

I agree, really nice looking receivers Roger, but the poor homely little viking just won't be part of the same crowd, no matter how nice it turns out. I'd like to see some pics when its done.