HAM INTERNATIONAL UK

i've just picked up a used Ham International UK transceiver. There is no identifying name on the case. It is quite a small radio and this is one of the reasons I chose it 6" wide 8" deep and 2" high. The fascia is basically split into 3 segments - the left one has a signal/power analogue meter, microphone connection, On/Off rotary switch and 10w/5w/.5w selector switch; the middle section has a large black plastic rotary channel selector (1-40) a red 'tx' light and the name Ham International UK in white writing under the selector; the right section has the channel display window, a High Medium and Low selector (120 channels), a rotary squelch which has a pull out facility to select FM. The frequencies, starting with low band is 25.7mhz (which I don't need) ending on 26.958mhz. Mid is 26.968 ending 27.408 and Hi is 27.415 ending 27.855. Can anybody help identifying this rig? and can I have it adapted to start on Lo @ 26.965 ending 27.405, Mid - UK freqs 27.60125 ending 27.99125 and Hi 27.410 ending 27.605. It would be ideal for mobile use - no messing with clarifiers etc as with the large Multi 2.

Hi. It sounds like the model UK 120FM. I wouldn't know about the possible modding though.

SangueG wrote:

Hi. It sounds like the model UK 120FM. I wouldn't know about the possible modding though.

Thank you mate - bang on. Found it on the site. Look for a rig doctor round here and see if it's worth having it played with to give full European and UK channels.

I have a soft spot for Ham International radios. My first Multimode radio was a Ham International MM2 and got me started on ssb, back in the day. As I remember on that particular model, it had mid/hi/super hi, although the bands were labelled low/mid/hi.

The Ham Int. UK is the same radio as the Colt 444, Tristar 727 and Superstar 95 for reference.
The bands on the Ham Int. are usually 120 up (26.965 - 28.305Mhz), others are usually 40 lo, 40 mid and 40 hi (26.515 - 27.855Mhz) so it looks as if your xtals have been changed. They use the LC7120 pll chip so isn't an easy conversion to UK 40, normally a piggy back pll board is needed. Or you could just tune the xtals for the UK offset and use a chart.

Here's a copy of the schematic: https://ibb.co/bKRsGxb

I swear the moment I ever see 'rig doctor' mentioned, it makes me think of Frankenstein's lab and a minion doing the monkey work.

Now it's not a knock at the competency of people in general, from CB days, but how many total and utter morons who's skill extended to dubiously copying badly imitated Chinese whispers of how to setup a radio properly, alignment wise.

God knows how many sets came through me hands, either from people who 'inherited' gifted unwanted rigs or had been stitched up into buying, that varied from total 'two bullet trains colliding' trainwrecks to stuff that probably had been OK but whoever had 'doctored' them hadn't realised that putting thermal compound on PA transistors and heatsink pairs actually wasn't optional.

And let's avoid the bigger deviation = louder ignorance demon tweaks ignorantly inherited to FM from the tweakers who cut their teeth on AM and didn't know that widening deviation wasn't the same at all. I've even encountered such butchery as re-engineered attempts to widen the extent to deviation ra he, where one actually achieved a peak deviation more commonly used on 25 kHz bw FM gear as was the norm for ham and commercial LMR gear. I could name the bright spark responsible for that butchery, but since he's five years fallen off his perch....

Filters installed by morons who never heard of SIG gens and why you need to impedance match between the existing ceramic filter configured setup to correctly accommodate and window centre the much narrower and higher impedance xtal replacement.

Now I mention it all here as the most commonly encountered accumulated sum of those horrors nearly always were in multimode and multi-band rigs and bar two, where all Cybernet chassis's or facsimile versions of. Strangely, though, I only ever saw two Uniden chassis trainwrecks - sure, the Uniden chassis's were marginally cleaner Tx wise when left alone by default, and Rx wise had marginally better selectivity but that was at a cost of slight comparative deafnes that became apparent when you migrated to a properly fitted xtal filter use, but god knows a bad filter install on Uniden chassis resulted in a stone deaf receiver (or at least compared to a decently done example).

So I seriously suggest you avoid anybody who has a 'rig doctor' rep or self-portrays themselves as such. At the very least, find somebody with a real workshop and proper test gear and can actually understand that you need to factory align any radio to baseline assessment alignment before you start trying to finds it's specific tolerances and fix/align/optimise it. Else you compound existing problems with new problems and end up making a usually very substandard mongrel of job of it.

So how there are any survivors that escaped the 'rig doctor' butchery is a mystery in itself, as for those so-called 'rig doctors', I'm sure there's a special purgatory reserved for them somewhere.

It's even more frightening horrible that such a breed of idiots became virtually of folk heroes status in the CB community.

If you wanted to name a major culprit to why early setups were attributed to causing interference to aviation VHF, thank idiot 'rig doctors' who undoubtedly added to whatever normal garbage the factory spec gear may have emitted.

I had literal death threats aimed at me, back in the day, for daring to highlight those people's butcher idiocy - and whilst I made no friends in the community because of my outlook, it was better than being in the sewage dwelling 'rig doctor' fraternity of which I easily could have raked in bundles for doing shoddy mods by being part of.

So if you actually value a radio of any kind, for sentimental or active use or collectible value but want it in GWO, don't take it to a 'rig doctor', unless you want it scarred by their spur marks best case.

Oh, just for reference - the original HI brand sets, like others that shared a common basic design, used a Cybernet chassis design - of which even without a reference diagram or schematic is notable because of the particular series of PLL chips used on them.

All the legal 27/81 spec gear using the Cybernet base design used the 7137 PLL which was notably different to the earlier 713x PLLs used on the AM and AM/SSB designs because the 7137 couldn't be forced to move outside of set steps etc (offsets of channels etc) because the BCD channel selector switch put states on the PLL selector inputs and regardless of what invalid combo you tried to force it to accept, an invalid code either resulted in a critical PLL unlock (effectively muting RX and disabling Tx) or forcing the rig to default to CH9. That's why if you look at the circuitry behind a CH9 'emergency' switch on 27/81 gear, all it does is force a miscode therefore putting you on 9.

I don't recall the LC713x series number part that was on CEPT only gear, but you definitely couldn't merely piggyback the CEPT series chip on the 7137 and switch between the two because of different pin breakouts between the two. Where the PLL counterparts used on CEPT FM gear and 27/81 FM gear based on a Uniden chassis could literally be piggybacked and a simple switch setup to disable one/enable the other one was easily done and reliable. Of course, a decent job involved a dual board you mounted two PLL's on switched to select between and a header cable that went to the main board connections. My first Uniden CEPT/UK dual FM was a straight piggyback mod, but I later tidied it up with a more permanent daughter board version using a DIY pcb and left over cut down ribbon cables left over from a ZX81 keyboard transplant. Where, by comparison, a LC7137 dual FM conversion made it necessary to remount the old PLL or a new 7137 on a daughter board with dual chip mounting, where the switching required was less simply as you had to compensate for nonidentical function arrangements pin wise between the variant used for CEPT and the 7137 used on UK gear.

So any HI or other Cybernet chassis CB multimode/multi-band rig with FM on it, from back then, that didn't use the 7137 was a fake 27/81 no matter what evidence was used to support the badge. Same goes for the Uniden based counterparts that used anything PLL that wasn't the restricted version chip that true UK market Uniden chassis type gear used.

That's how you could tell the legit UK stuff conclusively - by what PLL was used.

The only notable UK legit exception that didn't use a crippled PLL was the DNT series, which predated 27/81 FM requirements and the FM versions still retained the PLL from the previous AM versions and yes, you could play silly asses with the PLL and put in different oscillator crystals to move where the 40 channels began and ended - there are a few other brand sets that were licensed use of the DNT chassis or poor Chinese copies of.

But that severely more capable frequency mod capability was a combo of the fact the DNT design used multiple clock oscillators, and the PLL didn't rely on a specific single oscillator input to both act as base frequency input and as a divider/multiplier reference.

In fact it's still a mystery to how they (the DNT chassis based sets) actually got a legit 27/81 cert because they weren't locked down as the spec required and yet somehow, the cert stood uncontested and all unmodded DNT gear was never questioned. Even when I had a friendly visit from an RIS monkey, I actually brought it up as I owned one and he simply told me they never checked any DNT gear as it had been 'exempted'. Now I can't confirm or deny that, but up to and including when RadioTechnic brought up the remaining factory stock and later did a custom version (RT40 I seem to recall) with a more refined version of the RT 'tuned' factory variants of the M40 (that mine was), it was still legal a set (factory and variant M40) and ditto to RT's own brand custom version that survived until RT became a defunct venture.

That's one half of why DNT M40's and rarer B40's and the super rare HH variant were rapidly adopted for 10m conversion by the ham world as they were easily modified.

my self use it as it is buy a good multi band ssb am fm and use that in the car and use the ham radio as a one of radio

Thanks everybody for the info on this set. Might just leave it as it is. Bit more research needed.