Jan Skirrow, VE7DJX

British Columbia, Canada

Circuit Designer · Kit Builder · Community Innovator

Jan Skirrow, VE7DJX, is one of the R-390A community’s most enduring innovators — a designer who translated the theoretical improvements that the reflector’s technical community had long discussed into physical, buildable hardware that anyone with soldering skills and a modest parts budget could implement. His two most significant contributions — the SSB Detector kit and the universal carrier meter circuit — addressed longstanding performance limitations of the R-390A in ways that no amount of alignment or tube selection alone could resolve.

Jan’s work exemplifies a particular kind of contribution to the vintage radio community: not writing about what could be done, but actually designing it, testing it, documenting it, and making it available. Nearly twenty years after the SSB Detector kit was first offered for sale on the reflector, members are still asking about it, still building it, and still finding it one of the most worthwhile upgrades they can make to the receiver.

The SSB Detector

The R-390A was designed primarily as an AM receiver, and while its product detector provides usable SSB and CW reception, the performance falls short of what the receiver’s exceptional front-end selectivity and sensitivity warrant. Jan’s SSB Detector kit, developed around 2006, addressed this directly with a clean, well-engineered product detector design that took proper advantage of the IF output already available on the receiver.

The kit was offered through the reflector and built by community members across North America and beyond. In January 2025, a reflector member posted asking whether anyone had a copy of Jan’s front panel cutout template — the kit complete in parts but the template missing after years in storage. That a kit sold nearly twenty years earlier was still being built and enquired about is a measure of the design’s lasting value.

The Universal Carrier Meter Circuit

Jan also developed a universal carrier meter circuit for the R-390A, designed in collaboration with reflector contributor Gary Biasini. The carrier-level meter on the R-390A front panel is central to the receiver’s usability — it provides the signal-strength indication used during alignment and serves as the primary tuning aid in normal operation. Jan and Gary’s circuit offered a retrofittable improvement that extended the meter’s usefulness and addressed known limitations in the original design.

Hardware That Outlasts Its Builder

Jan appears to have stepped back from active participation in the reflector community in more recent years, but his hardware continues to circulate. His SSB Detector and carrier meter designs represent exactly the kind of contribution the vintage radio community most needs: documented, reproducible, and buildable by anyone willing to put in the work.

Mike Peace VK6ADA / r-390a.net Administrator
Boatanchor Legends Tribute Series — Preserving the History of the R-390A Community