I have been consilidating my now large collection of vintage radios. Weeding out the less desireable and attempting to get all functioning of those that i really like.
Its my intention that every favored radio will have a suitable vintage model to fly too. So my work is cut out!
Rather than throw away old transmitters ( that goes against my grain) I have been removing working innards of 35mhz sets which functioning well and using them as donors for older more desireable 27mhz sets.
Results have been very good if a little fiddly to do
Last project was a bit of a Frankenstein a super little Digit Migit 3 channel set.
The PPM signal for some reason was unuseable (tried all known cures) not only that during the process I managed to kill the board by shorting something against the case!
So I found a totally trashed Acoms 35mhz AM set in my junk box.
The board has the encoder at one end and the RF at the other. Following a bit of careful testing I was satisfied the encoder was working well and could be separated from the RF section by cutting it in half.
This i did sucessfully and using some little stand offs married it to a 35MHZ FM RF stage from a Futaba Challenger. The two boards now being the same size. I was then able to fit these neatly into the small TX case.
The great davantage of this little Acoms chip based encoder is that its driven by just 4 main control pots (the trims being totally mechanical like the majority of true vintage sets) I had no difficulty pairing with the pots/joysticks in the Digit Migit.
It works terrifically well with a strong consitent range. I decided to incorporate the meter and being round was an easy hole to drill.
So not to destroy the appearance of the Digit Migit I placed the meter on the bottom of the case. This is easy to look at at switch on .
The aerial is also from the challenger (I do love the shorter aerials Futaba use) and it balances way better than its original 27mhx aerial which was frankly too heavy for the soft aluminum case.
