What image size do you prefer for this site? I uploaded these off of my phone at whatever size I took them. I will be sure to resize next time. Is this one a better size?
The Solartron Schlumberger Stabilock 4040 is my all time favorite piece of equipment. I own several service monitors but I just like the way this works the best. For me the best feature is the 3 dual readouts, digital and analog. Digital displays are great for taking readings but when your doing a alignment I find it impossible to peak stages with a digital readout. Analog meters are the way to go there and make finding peak a lot easier. The 4040 has 3 analog meters paired with digital displays below them. Both analog and digital meters autorange together. This one came fully loaded with every option available. Bare bones they operate from 0.4 to 960 MHz. This one had the rare frequency doubler option so it goes all the way to 1.850 GHz. It also has the SSB stage, broadband FM demodulator, adjacent channel power meter, duplex FM demodulator, IEEE bus interface and control interface options. Basically the only thing it lacks is a built in spectrum analyzer. Personally I could never stand the tiny displays in most service monitors anyway. Its easy to hook a external one up to it, it has a output for that and that's how I use it. Honestly you don't need one since it does harmonic measurements. Just punch in what order harmonic you want to read, transmit unmodulated into it and it displays the harmonic level in db on one of the analog/digital displays. I got this one not working or should I say kind of working. At power up all the displays read giberish and the auto test tape drive ran non stop. I discovered that if you let it on for about 10 minutes it straightened itself out and worked fine. Let it off for several hours and power it on and it would do the same thing. I ended up tracking the problem down to a bad cap in the power supply. Figured what the heck and recaped the entire unit. 3 days later (oh my god there are a lot of caps in this thing) with the recap job done and calibration it is now back to like new. Since these were really designed for assembly line operation where they get turned on and are used 24 hours a day, year after year I figure it should last me the rest of my life. If I had to say what I did not like about it would not be the 4040 itself but the manuals. Ugggg, operating and service manuals written by German engineers. A little reading between the lines and head scratching later and I had it figured out.
Now back to the customers radio currently on the bench, a Browning Mark IV with a wonky PLL unit. Man these things are a TTL nightmare.
Sucks Nomad stopped making the digital VFO kits for these.
Mike
