#Knight Kit Space Spanner How To Listen As

Nightly DXing with the torture devices known as Trimm headphones led to high-pitched ringing in the ears per-sisting for hours unto sleep.

Notice the Long Wave plug in coil is 79 cents vs 65 cents for the others. If you wanna hear those frantic international distress calls, you gotta pay the piper, not to mention the coil winder with Litz wire patience. While the top of the line Span Master was futuristically tempting, I confess the O-Hopper's baroque trap door and retro plug in coils caught my eye something wicked. Knight Kit trio of simple regenerative receivers: Ocean Hopper, Space Spanner and Span Master.

Knight Kit Space Spanner How To Listen As

That brought memories of pouring over the old Allied Radio catalogs that I started sending off for in 1957, and of staring at pictures of a trio of Knight Kit regenerative receivers: The Ocean Hopper, the Space Spanner and the SpanMaster. It only made sense, I mean hams that had that gear when it was new certainly heard and worked DX without digital readout and DSP.And that brought back thoughts of those early receivers and what I might have done with them today. I have had some boat anchors that I used for casual listening but one day when looking back at logs from my very beginning time as a DX-er, I got to wondering if perhaps some of the DX I missed was due to the gear I had or just from my not knowing how to listen as well.This triggered using a couple of the older receivers to listen during a couple ham contests and found I could hear some of the DX with them.

Thus came the next step of ordering capacitors and replacing all of them, not just the electrolytics, but all of the paper caps. It arrived in fairly good shape, but had a terrible AC hum and no stations were audible through it. Two friends assisted in the search and some months later my friend Drew found one. I wondered just what I might have heard with it, if there could have been DX with it.Thus began a search for one, looking on E-Bay and other places. As time went on, I began my listening with my grandfathers's old Watterson 5-tube broadcast radio, then a homebrew receiver and eventually with a National SW-54 and beginning my ham career with a National NC-88.For some reason, my thoughts centered on the SpanMaster, perhaps because a school friend had one back in the early 1960's when I already had my National.

There was a bit of time playing with the regen, finding the ' sweet spot' for AM and the best selectivity.A trip down to Band 'A' and a tune through the broadcast band gave more practice in adjusting the regeneration and tuning. This was going well so far. Inching up the dial carefully, its band mates also showed up: Radio Havana on 5040 and the rock and roll of WTWW on 5085.

The rest of the hour was spent playing with the dial and the knobs and relearning how to tune the regen. A quick spin down the dial over the next hour resulted in the 'usual suspects' easily being logged: Radio Encyclopedia 530 from Cuba, XEWA on 540 from San Luis Potosi, XEX on 730, KTRH on 740, WSB on 750, WBAP on 820, WWL on 870, XEW on 900, XEQ on 940, local KBBW on 1010 gave a little practice on dealing with a strong signal and a reminder of how they will 'pull' a regen receiver and require more regen. Dial calibration was pretty close.

But would there be any DX?That question was answered just a few minutes later as I heard stations working a fellow and just giving signal report and state and clearing. Signals were a little drifty and tended to be a bit chirpy when strong as the receiver was pulled, but copyable. It took a little fiddling around with tuning and the regeneration controls to find the sweet spot for cw, copying K4NAX and K4ZNC. It was pretty near on!Tuning carefully further down, I ran in to some CW signals and quickly identified my first two:N0ENV and W4AG. With the bandspread set all the way over, I began tuning the main tuning down to the edge of the forty meter mark on the main dial and pretty close to it started running into ssb signals. Since it appeared that Band 'C' was pretty close to on calibration, I decided to try forty meters first.

Almost a full page of callsigns came next, but the real break came at 0213 when the first cross-the-ocean DX was logged with I1MMR.We were on the way. I was back in my childhood listening mode, logging and writing down every station identified, regardless of DX or not.The next milestone came February 5 with listening starting at 0030 GMT, a good start with VE3KZ first in the log on forty meters. Many stateside stations were logged. Before sleep overtook me, I had a half page of callsigns written into the log.The next few nights were spent polishing the tuning technique. In a few minutes that callsign was joined by XE2I and VA3SZ in the log. My first ham DX on the little two-tube regen.