The Drake T-4X Transmitter Restoration and Repair Project
The Drake T-4X is an HF amateur band transmitter covering 80 through 10 meters.
Four additional crystal sockets are available for 500 kHz ranges from 1.8-30 MHz (except 2.3-3, 5-6 and 11-11.5 MHz).
Modes include USB, LSB, CW and AM.
Input power is 200 watts CW, 260 watts AM/SSB.
The VFO provides 1 kHz dial accuracy.
VOX or PTT may be selected.
Another great gift from Douglas Dodd (GD3RFK), I hope he knows just how much I really do appreciate his friendship.
Time something to get my teeth into, a Drake T-4X Transmitter.
This one is a real beauty, for starters its truly is quite clean, it’s one of the copper clad chassis radio’s that Drake is very well known for and it really does look very clean indeed and in some cases near mint!
You can see from a look at the rear panel the cleanness of this little transmitter, it really is quite pretty and hopefully it will mean that the chassis still has all it’s copper plating.
That said it does have a few problems, although not really confirmed, the unit may have been set to the wrong voltage and powered up, also, and mainly because of that fact the unit has been kind of butchered, all of the valves have been removed, this will not be too much of a problem for me as I have boxes of brand new (or should it be ‘New Old Stock’) valves that I was given from Mike Farrant (GD4BEG), and I know I have loads of valves for all Drake equipment in that lot.
Doing a quick once over I can also see through the holes in the top cover that the crystals are removed as well, again I have a set of these given too me just recently from Douglas so this should hopefully speed me on my way.
As with the other Drake unit that I am restoring, this unit also has a perfect front panel.
I am not going to get into this too deeply yet until I am ready for it, but I should think that the copper-work will need a good clean, and most of the internal metalwork will need looking at, and although the cleaner of the two radios, I will most probably be spending more time on this one, especially when it comes to cleaning the internals, again the ultrasonic cleaner will be used a lot with this radio to restore as much of the internals to as new condition.
