A fix for drift?

Does anyone else have a slow drift problem with their Hull Hartley? I was looking at mine and spotted something I wanted to check into.

The center tap resistors for the filament are mounted right under the tuning cap. Any heat they generate goes right to the tuning cap. Hull suggests 50-200 ohm resistors there. I used a couple of 40 ohm resistors thinking that as long as my power supply can handle the extra current draw I'd be ok. Now I have a .7 watt heat source where Hull's design had as low as a .14 watt heat source there. Any heat might cause a problem. oops.

These two resistors are in the circuit to provide a ground point for cathode keying, but there is an alternative. I have a center tapped 7.5 V filament supply. I can remove those two 40 ohm resistors and just key the filament transformer center tap. The heat source will be removed so my Hartley should now stay on frequency better.

*** clock ticks while solder smoke rises ****

Well, I removed the 40 ohm filament center tap resistors from my Hull Hartley. It is a fairly clean change. The only visible indication of the modification is the addition of one fahnestock clip along the left side for the transformer center tap connection. Now that heat source is gone.

I did before and after standby drift measurements. After tuning on the rig I checked the transmit frequency every 30 seconds for 15 minutes. Key down was only long enough every 30 seconds to get a transmit frequency readout. I had no load connected and the plate current was about 18mA with 300 volts B+.

Was is worth it?

*** Now drums rollllll ***

It depends

On 80 meters I found that the original Hull design drifted about 2KHz from a cold start while the modified version drifted about 500Hz. That's good but both took about 15 minutes to settle down. With both versions I still have to be careful about jumping on the air right after power on. I saw no significant change on 40.

But two parts were eliminated along with some amount of power on drift, both good things.

If I were starting out now building my Hull Hartley and I had a center tapped filament transformer I'd make this change. If I already had my Hull Hartley up and running, I'd probably let it be.