Ugly Heath Twins- Public Service Announcement

[Multi-Volti Devices]

APOLOGIES for the 'bandwidth', but I had some ugly Heath twins too. Hope you enjoy
my experience, and DO NOT buy the rigs described herein at a hamfest, whatever you
do!

When I lived near Philadelphia, I also bought a Heath Twins pair (301/401) that
had been 'defaced' to put it politely. They came with a story as well as a hideous
appearance.
I can't remember which had which color, but one of the two had been painted safety
orange (the 301 RX I think) and the other blue, supposedly so the guy could tell
the transmitter from the receiver. Each had a silver dollar epoxied inside the vfo
knob, but one had been either pried out or the knob replaced before I got it. The
receiver worked beautifully, but the transmitter was notorious in the region for
sounding like it was under water on cw (I didn't have a microphone then, and dread
to even think what it might have sounded like on ssb). They had been painted with
the cabinets on. I guess the %#%#^ had the sense to mask the front panels, because
there was no evidence of really gross paint mismanagement to a naive purchaser
(guess who---I only heard about the notorious reputation after I came home with
them from a used equipment store). Well, because they had been sprayed with the
cabinets on, I found out later that the perforated cabinets had many of the holes
plugged with paint (to make matters worse, they had been sprayed grey prior to the
psychedelic paint (or should that be psycho-delirious?). The bottom circuit boards
were completely covered with paint. With a sinking feeling in my stomach I cheered
myself up by laughingly calling the paint a 'conformal coat' to protect against
fungus. It was about hopeless to remove the paint, in my opinion.

I did take the cabinets to a sandblaster and he said "an hour, tops". He spent
about 90 minutes and charged me an hour and a quarter. They were bare aluminum, a
little thin in spots, and I sprayed them gray.

I worked some great DX with the receiver, but everyone on the cw nets who knew
better figured out what rig I was using by the sound of it. I met another poor
slob who had also owned it.

It was many years ago, and maybe I'm telling a fish-story a little by now, but I
think the locals recommended I take it as far away from home as I could to sell
it, to protect everyone in our area who might be unwittingly be exposed to it. I
might have left the silver dollar in the knob as a historical tracer.

I don't think I got burned, but I was glad to get another transmitter in the
shack.

Murray K3FD

Ray Mack wrote:

> Fellow Heathens:
>
>         At one point I owned a SB301/401 pair in Delaware.  These were really
> weird.  Someone somewhere along the line painted the cabinets *BRIGHT* yellow.
> I was just wondering if anyone here on the list ended up with them?
>
> Ray Mack
> WD5IFS
> mack at mails.imed.com
>
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