Fall 2002 Issue

“DXing” With a Heathkit Twoer

What was your first DX contact? You will never forget working your first DX QSO—especially if it was a QRP contact! Bob Witmer, W3RW, challenges us to never underestimate what can be accomplished in amateur radio, no matter how Spartan the equipment you own may be.

By Bob Witmer, W3RW
 

The Heathkit Twoer, a 2-meter AM transceiver with a crystal-controlled transmitter and a tunable receiver.

Would you believe that a Heathkit Twoer and a hand-held beam produced an AM QSO of nearly 100 miles—without the aid of any mountaintops?

First, of course, you have to know what a Heathkit Twoer was. It was a 2-meter AM transceiver with a crystal-controlled transmitter and a tunable receiver (which generally tuned about one quarter of the band at any given time!—ed.).

Back in 1967, I operated 6 meters AM exclusively. However, I wanted to try something new. A good friend, Allen McQuate, K3HQC, was a member of the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service. (RACES). Allen was using a Civil Defense (CD) Gonset Communicator IV transceiver on 2 meters, and he was having a great time. I decided to try the band.

Like most hams at the time, I was very familiar with the Heathkit catalog and the Heath HW-30 Twoer (see table 1). The price of the Twoer was reasonable, so I decided to buy one. At that time, I was attending Drexel University in Philadelphia, which presented another factor in my decision to purchase the rig. Since Dennis Shaak, K3WFW, and I had many classes together, we decided that it would be fun to have a voice channel to use when we were doing homework. Two meters seemed like a good band to try (In 1967, 2 meters was as sparsely populated as 222 MHz is today—ed.).

Educating myself while the Twoer was on order, I decided to see what had been written about it. I checked the Drexel library, and I was delighted to find a good collection of amateur radio magazines, including CQ and QST. I found an interesting article in the March 1965 issue of CQ entitled “Souping Up The Twoer,” by Frederick W. Brown.

After reading the article, I decided that the section on improving the output power (to raise the original 1/2 watt to approximately 1 watt) would be worth trying. Because I had not yet built the kit, I decided to install the “mods” from the beginning of the assembly.
 

Click here to subscribe to VHF and read more about the Heathkit Twoer.

_________________

© Copyright 2002, CQ Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced or republished, including posting to a website, in part or in whole, by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher, CQ Communications, Inc. Hyperlinks to this page are permitted.