{"id":5102,"date":"2020-10-08T14:13:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-08T03:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2020\/10\/08\/ha-600a-gets-a-new-coat-of-paint-after-almost-50-years\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T18:21:17","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T08:21:17","slug":"ha-600a-gets-a-new-coat-of-paint-after-almost-50-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2020\/10\/08\/ha-600a-gets-a-new-coat-of-paint-after-almost-50-years\/","title":{"rendered":"HA-600A Gets a New Coat of Paint — After Almost 50 years!"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The HA-600A that I picked up last week was looking kind of sorry. There was a lot of rust on the cabinet. Below is the before picture. <\/b><\/div>\n
<\/a><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
I’m not really into cabinetry or radio aesthetics, but it is amazing what a 6 dollar can of spray paint can do. Formula 409 also helps. I moved the light bulbs forward a bit to get more light on that Juliano Blue dial. <\/b><\/div>\n

<\/b><\/div>\n
I am really enjoying this radio. It has brought back many memories. I think I got one for Christmas in 1972. I was 14. I got my Novice ticket on April 27, 1973 and made my first contact on July 19, 1973. For that first contact I was using an HA-600A and a Heathkit DX-40. Later I used the Lafayette with a Heathkit DX-100. The HA-600A was replaced by the far superior Drake 2B on April 11, 1974. So I used this receiver for more than two years. <\/b><\/div>\n

<\/b><\/div>\n
Looking around inside this receiver (and following up with Google) I learned some more about it: <\/b><\/div>\n
— It was made in Japan. <\/b><\/div>\n
— The manual says it has a “mechanical filter” but in fact it has a Toyo ceramic filter. This may have been just an honest mistake by the folks who wrote the manual — maybe they didn’t understand the difference between the two types of filters. <\/b><\/div>\n
— There is a big difference between the HA-600 and the HA-600A, mostly in the front end circuitry. The HA-600 has fewer amplifier circuits at the front end. This probably explains why the HA-600 I picked up did not seem to live up to my memories of my teen-year HA-600A. <\/b><\/div>\n

<\/b><\/div>\n
The fellow who gave it to me tells me that it had belonged to the short-wave listener father of a friend of his. <\/b><\/div>\n

<\/b><\/div>\n
I know we have a lot of tube-type receivers that are much older than this thing, but I still think it is pretty amazing that this is a receiver that I used almost half a century ago. And it is still as good as new.<\/b><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The HA-600A that I picked up last week was looking kind of sorry. There was a lot of rust on the cabinet. Below is the before picture. I’m not really into cabinetry or radio aesthetics, but it is amazing what a 6 dollar can of spray paint can do. Formula 409 also helps. I moved … Continue reading “HA-600A Gets a New Coat of Paint — After Almost 50 years!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,16,106,100,72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-drake-2b","category-filters","category-lafayette-ha-600a","category-old-radio","category-short-wave-listening"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5105,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5102\/revisions\/5105"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}