Early Projects

Here is a picture of my shack soon after getting married and moving into our house. The strange thing about this photo is that I am sitting in the same room looking at the same wall while typing this 30 years on!
On the left was my home built 160m / 80m SSB Transeiver with the gorgeous Eddystone 898 dial. This was probably one of the biggest projects that I built. The receiver and most of the transmitter used the Plessey SL600 chips, some bought new and others untested from the 'Birkett' stall at rallies. The PA was an EL81 which gave about 10w RF output on 160m. The most expensive bit was the SSB filter which was a Kocosi filter. I remember going to the Leicester Rally with a list of bits needed to finish this project and managed to get everything!
Next to this was my trusted 2m transmitter, QQvo310 in the PA and plug-in 8MHz crystals for the frequency. (Remember this was days of tuning high to low!)
Next the famous Hallicrafters SX24 receiver, shortly after taking this picture it's mains transformer melted filling the house with a disgusting oily smell. I later replaced the transformer and the receiver was back in action.
On the top shelf was my 70cm transvertor. It used two QQVO350 valves, the first tripled the 144MHz input and then the second provided 10w output. This was built originally for transmission of television signals using grid modulation.
It worked well!
Ther is also a Pye Cambridge on the right of the picture, but you can only see the microphone.