[SCCC] AM to SSB transition (transceivers)

[Tree]

Nice posting Wayne!!  I had forgotten about the Swan tri-bander - the 240
and never saw the single band radios.

Heathkit also had some single band SSB radios (HW12, HW22 and HW32 if I
remember correctly) and of course there was the triband Eico 753.  And the
WRL duobander!!

I remember at least one double side band guy in the AM roundtables.  They
were welcome since their audio demodulated okay in the AM mode.

My vintage station doesn't do SSB.  Have a Collins 32V3 and 75A2 plus a
Ranger for 160 meters.

Remember seeing the W6AM mobile setup once going up the freeway to
Visalia.  We flagged him over and got the tour.

Tree

On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 3:12 AM Wayne Overbeck via SCCC <sccc at contesting.com>
wrote:

> I'd like to follow up a little more about the transition from AM to SSB
> in the 1950s and early 1960s.  Thanks to Art and Tree for adding their
> observations about this.
>
> My earlier post was about what it was like to operate a phone contest on
> AM.  This is about the early transmitters and transceivers that made SSB
> practical for thousands of us.
>
> At first SSB was an exotic specialty mode.  No one really questioned its
> superiority to AM for long-haul voice DX, but getting on was a technical
> and
> financial challenge.  That started to change in the late 1950s.  First of
> all a
> company named Central Electronics launched a line of high quality SSB
> exciters (the 10A, 10B and 20A) then the 100V, a 100-watt transmitter.
> The company was acquired about 1959 and withdrew from the amateur
> radio market.  Too bad...
>
> As Art pointed out, Collins Radio identified a military application and
> started
> making SSB transmitters, receivers and transceivers in the 1950s.  The
> S-Line
> became the standard of excellence for everyone, but it was too expensive
> for
> a lot of young hams, me included.  I looked at the Collins 75A4 and KWS-1
> in
> awe in the 1950s.  By the 1960s I was even more awe-struck by the snazzy
> new styling of the S-Line.
>
> Art also mentioned double sideband.  I had built a DSB transmitter from
> Don
> Stoner's "New Sideband Handbook," a 1958 CQ publication.  It worked
> well, but DSB wasn't SSB and I didn't feel welcome in the clubby world of
> SSB round-tables.  I put the DSB rig away and kept using my DX-100 on
> AM phone, which is where most of the action was in the late 1950s.
>
> I think the key turning point in the popularization of SSB was the
> introduction
> of the Swan 120, Swan 140 and Swan 175 transceivers about 1961.  These
> were low-cost single-band transceivers that introduced thousands of hams
> to
> SSB.  They were far smaller than most previous SSB equipment and they were
> TRANSCEIVERS.  In one small box there was a complete transmitter and
> receiver that offered remarkably good performance for the price and size.
> Many of us operated mobile with one of these in a car by 1962 or 1963.
> Herb Johnson, W6QKI, the founder of Swan, had come up with a
> breakthrough product.
>
> Soon Swan offered the three-band Swan 240, also at a modest price.  Then
> Swan launched the 400, a five-band transceiver.  It had an outboard VFO,
> but
> it was still compact and affordable.  The VFO could be under the dash,
> with the rig itself in a car trunk.  Don Wallace, W6AM, used one of these
> for
> years in a succession of cars.  He still had it in his car when he drove
> up to his
> "radio ranch" for the 1986 video shoot in which I interviewed him for Mike
> Adams' "Radio Collector" public television series.   The uncut version of
> that
> video is still on YouTube.
>
> Swan then managed to fit the VFO inside a five-band transceiver and
> launched
> the Swan 350, as mentioned by Tree.  That was probably Swan's most
> successful
> product and it introduced thousands more hams to SSB.  But by then Swan
> had a lot of competition in the SSB transceiver market.  National was
> making
> the NCX-3 and NCX-5, while Hallicrafters launched the SR-150 and Heathkit
> produced the SB-100 as a five-band transceiver kit.  Then there was the
> Galaxy 5 and later models from the successor to Globe Electronics.  Drake
> announced the TR-3 as a five-band transceiver with one KHz dial
> calibration.
> Collins was still making the S-Line, including the KWM-2 transceiver
> (successor
> to the early KWM-1 triband unit).  There was also the mostly-solid-state
> SBE-33
> transceiver.  By the time Kenwood announced the TS-520 and Yaesu produced
> the original FT-101, SSB had arrived.
>
> By 1966, almost everybody competing in phone Sweepstakes was on SSB.
>  Soon
> AM was a nostalgia mode--not the place you went to operate contests or
> work new
> countries.
>
> Thanks for following these tales of the transition from AM to SSB.  I hope
> others will
> offer more memories of ham radio in the pre-Woodstock era.
>
> 73, Wayne, N6NB
>
>
> .
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