{"id":9824,"date":"2015-03-21T12:27:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-21T01:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2015\/03\/21\/kirks-herring-aid-tuna-tin-and-regen-adventures\/"},"modified":"2025-07-22T03:23:54","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T17:23:54","slug":"kirks-herring-aid-tuna-tin-and-regen-adventures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2015\/03\/21\/kirks-herring-aid-tuna-tin-and-regen-adventures\/","title":{"rendered":"Kirk’s Herring Aid, Tuna Tin, and Regen Adventures"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hello Bill!<\/span><\/div>\n
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Just a quick hello from MN to tell you how much I have been enjoying your podcast. Although I have “plugged” your stuff in multiple magazine columns over the years, I’m a bit late getting into the listening game. My current contract job has me doing a lot of driving, however, so I now have several years’ worth of soldersmoke to enjoy.<\/div>\n
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Several of the most recent episodes have made it clear that we have covered some common ground in our amateur radio careers. <\/div>\n
I was licensed in 1977 at age 15 — a year after I built my Tuna Tin 2 \ud83d\ude42 The transmitter was a smashing success. I used it with my Tempo One transceiver, or at the electronics repair shop at a local National Guard base (where my mom worked as a civilian administrator). I would ride my bike to Camp Ripley (only 8 miles or so), and the guys in the signal shop would let me use the shop’s Collins KWM-2 HF transceiver (and attached dipole). Other than my efforts, I don’t think the KWM-2 got much use…<\/div>\n
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I, too, tried to get the Herring Aid 5 to work, with no luck at all. Listening to your podcast was like being in a time machine of sorts \ud83d\ude42 I wonder if I got the “sense” of the oscillator secondary messed up? I never did get that thing to make even a sound. I don’t have it any longer. The same goes for the TT2. They got “lost” when I stored a bunch of stuff at my dad’s place in-between moves, as did a home-brew 4-400A amplifier and a 6146B amplifier for my Ten-Tec Argonaut. Darn!<\/div>\n
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Don’t forget about the matching VFO — the Chopped Beef Slider (CB Slider), which was built into a chopped beef can, of course! I didn’t build one, but as I recall it was a diode-tuned 40-meter VFO for the TT2.<\/div>\n
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Your “regen rage” and its subsequent easing was also amusing. I have had a love-hate relationship with those buggers, too, although mine was mostly love. You referenced Dave Newkirk’s (now W9VES) 40-meter QST regen article in a podcast. I was fortunate enough to be a QST editor at the time Dave was in his “second residence.” That guy forgot more about receivers than I will ever know, and he helped me tremendously in official and unofficial capacities. <\/div>\n
I have attached a photo (above) of a multiband regen that Dave helped me build (he designed and dispensed wisdom while I built the radio). He took a schematic from a 1930s ARRL Handbook and tweaked it a bit, helping me add a VR tube, “more modern” tubes and a few other goodies. Just to be difficult, I sampled the tank circuit with a tiny-value capacitor and a high-gain MMIC amplifier so I could drive a frequency counter, which displayed the receive frequency as long as the tank was oscillating. It was fun, but it was difficult to isolate the digital noise from the counter, so I only really turned on the counter as necessary, or to calibrate a dial, etc. The chassis used to be an Eico audio signal generator… In the photo the Jackson Brothers dial and bezel\/tuning scale isn’t completely installed. After sitting in a box for 25 years, the regen still works but probably needs new tubes, as it’s rather deaf \ud83d\ude42 Blasphemy aside, I’m moving on to solid-state regens…<\/div>\n
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I, too, just got a Rigol DSO. Wow, the “one-button” measurement is almost too easy. <\/div>\n
I’m prepping my book, Stealth Amateur Radio, for release on the Kindle (and maybe other e-book formats), but it’s available now from my website, www.stealthamateur.com<\/span><\/a>. <\/div>\n
Keep up the good work, Bill. <\/p>\n

I’ll be listening. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

73,<\/p>\n

–Kirk Kleinschmidt, NT0Z
Rochester, MN<\/p>\n

Editor, 1990 ARRL Handbook
Technical Editor, Ham Radio for Dummies
QST Assistant Managing Editor, 1988-1994
Ham Radio Columnist since 1989 for:
Popular Communications
Monitoring Times and now,
The Spectrum Monitor (www.thespectrummonitor.com<\/span><\/a>)<\/div>\n

My book, “Stealth Amateur Radio,” is now available from
www.stealthamateur.com<\/strong><\/span><\/a> and on the Amazon Kindle (soon)<\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n

Our book: “SolderSmoke — Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics” http:\/\/soldersmoke.com\/book.htm<\/a> Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http:\/\/www.cafepress.com\/SolderSmoke<\/a> Our Book Store: http:\/\/astore.amazon.com\/contracross-20<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hello Bill! Just a quick hello from MN to tell you how much I have been enjoying your podcast. Although I have “plugged” your stuff in multiple magazine columns over the years, I’m a bit late getting into the listening game. My current contract job has me doing a lot of driving, however, so I … Continue reading “Kirk’s Herring Aid, Tuna Tin, and Regen Adventures”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,167,103,148,168],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antennas","category-herring-aid-5","category-knack-stories","category-regens","category-tuna-tin-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9824","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=9824"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9826,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9824\/revisions\/9826"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}