Does anyone know where I can get some crystals? I want to use my Pro-45 as a weather monitoring station. I need the standard NOAA channel crystals. 162.400MHz ,162.425MHz, 162.450MHz, 162.475MHz, 162.500MHz, 162.525MHz162.550MHz I would really rather NOT use Ebay or almost any 3rd party, but I may have to because I dont think anyone carries them anymore.
There are places that will still make them upon request but not cheaply.
Someone will probably come along with the names of those crystal companies that are still in business. They all escape me right now.
I went to get a few crystals for some old Bearcat III's and the cost for newly manufactured one was way up there from what I recall. I ended up buying several assortments of crystals from eBay sellers. Sometimes as many as 200 or more for dirt cheap. Sure, there were many that I could not use and several duplicates and a few duds but I'd still get about 95% success in what I received.
I've also purchased oddball crystals from sellers for things like specific rail channels. Never had any issues with them. There is one guy on there that has a ton and you can search his listing for specific frequencies for both 10.7 and 10.8 MHz IF's. I'm not for certain but the Pro-45 most likely uses 10.7 MHz IF crystals unless it was made by Electra in which case it would use the 10.8 crystals.
You can also change the crystal filters in the 10.7 MHz IF radios and use tighter filters so the radio will handle the narrow bandwidth signals better.
I think I bought my 10.7 IF crystal filters from Mouser or DigiKey. They worked just fine. You just need to try and figure out if the originals were 2 or 4 pole filters as you don't want to replace two 2 pole filters with two 4 pole filters. It would still work but your sensitivity would be reduced.
You would get 12.5 kHz filters to replace the 25 kHz filters. They also sold 6.25 kHz filters for the 10.7 MHz IF section. There are usually two crystal filters in series with each other in a typical scanner.
I've tried finding 10.8 MHz narrower crystal filters but never had any luck.
I still use my old Electra crystal models for a lot of low band and VHF works but many are narrowband now so the audio has changed to a lower level but still plenty useable. I suspect if someone set up shop on an new narrowband adjacent channel that the old Electra Bearcats would suffer from crosstalk. I think the plan is to not setup nearby users on the old wideband channels and the new neigbor narrowband channel created with narrowbanding for users that are located near one another.
I thought JAN Crystal was still going as it rings a bell in my head.
I'll look through my stock of crystals for the 7 NOAA channels and see what I have. If I have spares, I may offer to send them to you for nothing.
I only need you to try and find out if the Pro-45 uses a 10.7 MHz IF crystal. That info should be in the manual if you can find a copy.
Edit: I found the owners manual and it does use the more common 10.7 crystals so I'll see what I have.
Edit: PM me and I'll tell you what I have.