Heathkit GR-64 Restoration

My latest radio restoration project is a Heathkit GR-64 Shortwave Receiver. This was a low-end receiver made from 1964 to 1971 and originally selling for $39.95. It covers AM and shortwave in four bands and utilizes four tubes.

This one was acquired on eBay. Other than the usual scratches and small cracks around the plastic front panel, it looked to be in pretty good shape. It had suffered a bit in shipping with some tubes and the power transformer coming loose, but there did not seem to be any damage. It appeared to be complete, and when powered up it picked up several AM stations.

The shortwave bands didn't seem to be working well, if at all, and the S-meter was always off scale.

A check of the components showed that most resistors had drifted up in value, as is normal for the old carbon composition type. I replaced a few were 20% off or more. I figured that was the likely case of the S-meter problems, as it uses some resistors as a voltage divider to compare the AVC voltage to a reference value.

However, that did not fix the problem. I spent considerable time poking around, checking components and wiring. I tried swapping some of the tubes with known good ones from a Heathkit AR-3.

After lifting several resistors in the AVC circuit, there was still a resistance of about 60K to ground that should not be there and I could not account for.

The printed circuit board really had a lot of rosin flux residue on it. On a hunch, I scraped some of it off, and the mysterious resistance to ground went way up. After cleaning the board with alcohol to remove the flux, the resistance became too high to measure. The S-meter also started reading on scale. Lesson learned - flux residue can cause problems in high impedance circuits. Obviously this flux was there since the kit was built but whether it caused a problem from day one or only later, who knows.

The next problem was that it was dead on bands other than AM. Actually band D was working (poorly). There was no local oscillator activity at all on bands B and C. All the coils looked good. But I was seeing a low resistance between the local oscillator tuning capacitor and ground on bands B through D that should not be there, according to the schematic. The local oscillator frequency on band D was also way off.

After a bit of tracing of the circuit I found the cause: two wires that crossed were touching where there was insulation missing and were shorted. One was the antenna lead and the other was from the local oscillator. After pulling them apart, the local oscillator started running on all bands.

I did a full alignment and it all went well -- I could align each band on each end of the dial. Because of the low 455 KHz IF frequency you have to watch out that you don't align to the image frequency that is only 910 KHz away from the correct one. The manual mentions this in the procedure, but I almost did this on one band and thought at first that I could not get it to align correctly.

Restoration is now almost complete. The S-meter is still off scale for no signal, so I expect to have to tweak some of the resistors in the circuit.

The limited testing I have done indicate that the radio is reasonably sensitive and can pick up lots of shortwave broadcast signals with a decent antenna. It would not be very suitable for amateur radio, as bands like the 40 meter ham band only take up a small portion of the dial. The BFO is also hard to use as it is not very stable and interacts with other controls, so it could be used for strong CW signals but would be frustrating for SSB.

I plan to make a YouTube video on this radio as I have done for the other models I own, so watch for that in the coming weeks.