About the Author and His SX-28 Project

Hi,

My name is Mickey Lane. I'm retired and live in Zephyrhills, Florida.

When I was a kid, I had an SX-28. I played with it a lot. I liked to collect QSL cards from AM stations. Browse the list here. I credit the radio with getting me started on an electronic engineering career that's lasted almost 60 years. Well, it started out as electronics but morphed into some pretty heavy duty software.

I wanted a working SX-28 to take me back to those days. Rebuilding any other model just wouldn't do it for me.

I started this project by buying a for-parts radio on eBay. The seller didn't do a very good job packing the 75 pound radio and apparently the box disintegrated while being shipped via UPS and the radio landed on a cement floor. The case was trashed, parts were broken and when all was said and done, I got a substantial refund. (Guy was pretty decent about it.)

There were numerous problems with the thing so I bid on a second one. While delivery of that one was seriously disrupted by Hurricane Helene, I found a third one for a nice price.

End result: I wound up with 3 very similar SX-28A radios, none of which I would dare power up.

Objective: Make one good radio and sell the leftovers to recover the cost of my folly.

My initial plan was to take all three radios apart and test each group of three like parts to make sure they all worked the same. If one was off, it was probably bad. This proved successful but what little refurbishment I got done showed me I'd need some sort of guide other than the printed materials to put a radio back together again.

Being a computer nerd, I immediately opted for a website just for me to keep track of my notes. I already had the framework set up on my desktop PC and it was a simple matter to add to that. It's easy to integrate notes and pictures using HTML web pages.

A couple things happened to derail this scheme.

• After a while, my enthusiasm slumped.
• I started spending more time on the website than the build.
• I discovered my age has taken a toll on my ability to do fine work like sneak a soldering iron in between a bunch of parts I don't want melted.
• I found another radio on eBay that I could drive to pick up without too much effort. While packing the radio into the car, the guy said "Here, you can have this one too."

At this point, I had acquired five radios. Most of the 1st two had been sold to other folks via eBay. I even sold two the bare chassis.

I was down to one early radio that I thought I could get working, one early radio that went direct parts, and my build from the ground up that wasn't very far along.

Then there was another 'deal' on eBay. That was number six.

Then there was a fully restored radio on eBay with a speaker. By this time, I was convinced I was never going to get my build-from-scratch completed (health, age) so I bought it. I'm not buying any more radios.

I made my website available to the public via no-ip.com. That's a thing where you run the website on your home PC and the no-io.com folks redirect users from their stable IP address to your dynamic IP address. It's kinda cool if your site is very low volume.

It has been on my to-do list for a while to move the site to a proper hosting company. In late April, 2026, I did that.

Next and last step in the evolution of this website is to locate people to help run it. I'm old. I can almost see 80. It'd be nice if this information was usable after I'm gone. If you have any thoughts on that, please share.

Page: /Mickey/Mickey_3.shtml

Last modified: Friday, 15 May 2026