In late 1980, I collected up
all of my shekels, and went back to my friendly Drake Dealer, Bob
Fransen, VE6RF and ordered the (then new) R7-A receiver. I talked
to a lot of folks before dropping $2400 on this set, and it seems
laughable that some of them advised me to build my own radio rather
than spending that much money on a receiver. The idea isn't that
ridiculous, it's just not very practical. Even if I gathered
together $2400 worth of RF and other components, I'd still need
about $100K worth of test equipment (spectrum analyzers,
oscillioscopes, signal generators, etc.) in order to assemble the
parts into something with the same level of performance as the
R7-A.
Shortly after I bought the R7-A, I met Don Moman. I didn't feel quite as crazy after meeting Don and I was quite relieved to meet someone as down to earth and practical as Don who had also bought an R7-A. Don is one of the most serious SWLs I know today, and he also introduced me to the Canadian International DX (CIDX) club, and shortly after we met, I was invited on a DXpedition to Pallisades Mountain, in Jasper National Park. On this trip, Don and I both brought our R7-As, and Don brought his Drake SPR-4 too. We had quite a formidable line-up of equipment on top of the mountain. Needless to say, the R7-As were the workhorses of the 1981 DXpedition. We made logs like Turkey on 182 kHz using our short (800 foot) beverage on the mountaintop. I took my R7-A on at least one other DXpedition, to the Cardinal Divide, near Hinton, Alberta with similar results.
The R7-A, in it's day, had superior dynamic range and intermoduation performance, was relatively broadband, had excellent selectivity and sensitivity. The disadvantages of the R7-A were heat and power consumption, noise from the digital display, and (occasional) slow frequency slewing. The main VFO used the legendary Drake PTO, coupled with a built-in synthesizer and digital frequency counter (this was the difference between the amateur-band only R7 and the R7-A) so the set had 500 kHz bands, but the painful part was that you would tune up a 500 kHz segment, get to the top, press the band button to tick the synthesizer up to the next band, only to find yourself at the top of that segment, 500 kHz from where you left off. Don Moman wrote several review and modification articles relating to the R7-A, and one of the major faults he uncovered was the amount of noise that the power supply and digital circuitry put out. These problems could be avoided to some extent by using external power supplies and antennas, but they did get in the way of the set during MW DXing in particular. I've never seen a PBT (passband tuning) control as wide or as smooth as the one on the R7-A. The R7A is also the first set I owned that could hold it's own against any amateur-only receiver or transceiver, not that this is surprising, since the R7-A is a variant of the R7 amateur-only receiver. I attribute a lot of this to the 8 pole crystal IF filters. I haven't seen a CW filter yet that was as "tight" as the 300 Hz one I put on the R7-A.