….Well another walk today, but my brother - the black one feigned a limp so I had to accompany the man up the hill. He had his large backpack today and he took an age at the summit. He took everything out the bag and then began to assemble something like a rubics cube which he attached to the pole thing. I tried barking at it but it didn’t seem to help much. The people my man was talking to complimented me on my barking, apparently the barking modulation was much better than the mans voice. (*) Then this woman came over with a dog she had carried up the hill (imagine the indignity of that) worried that I was cold or hurt. Well of course I wasn’t I was attention seeking and I could see a couple of grouse in the distance…. I was of course silent for the entire time apart from when he plays radio…
(The day before I had a dry run in the garden faffing around for about and hour to get everything connected. Woody was also out in the garden and was silent until I tested the SWR on transmit and called “CQ” at which point he joined in. Why have I got a dog that responds to a CQ call….?)
Well only 4 months into the challenge and I’ve finally got going from Nine Standards Rig G/NP-018. The backpack was the large one as I was carrying the FT-817, Tokyo-Hi Power 30W amp, a 4 element yagi (IZ2UUF design), 4Ah LiFe battery and as insurance the KX2 with a not very 41ft random wire antenna (and counterpoise).
Some observations. When you forget your glasses the display on the Yasau rig is quite small. I need to find a way of keeping the elements of the antenna neatly in place as they move as the antenna is lifted and the second hand amp seems to take about 2 seconds to switch from tx to rx after transmitting….
I think I have become reasonably efficient when doing an activation with my usual KX2 / FT270 combination and it took me much longer to sort out the FT-817 / linear combination along with the antenna. Trying to work out which direction to beam was also a bit fiddly with only two open directions from the summit as the hill isn’t brilliant for VHF as there are bigger hills in most directions surrounding it.
I had a very good report on FM (59+) with Geoff GM4WHA but it was a real struggle on SSB, but I did change the polarisation and I’m guessing that Geoff didn’t.
Conclusions…. I probably ought to sort out the transvertor to work with the KX2. I probably need a couple of elastic bands to hold the elements in properly, and I probably need a hill with better take off…. But at least I have made a start!
I only have a vertical collinear at home so i am only vertically polarised.
On FM i was running 50 watts from a YAESU FTM-500. On 2m SSB i was using a borrowed ICOM IC-705 running 10 watts. Still it was a good contact for me as Nine Standards Rigg is 87 km from my home.
Thank you for the contact and perserverance in our 2m SSB contact. It was much appreciated.
This has become an issue for me as well. I never used to have any problem reading my 817, but now need to take a pair of cheap reading glasses on activations. No such issue with the KX3 or IC-703.
I did listen for you for a while, but unfortunately copied nothing from you. Conditions were goodr from my location towards the south-east with the Kent beacon much stronge than usual. A few CQs resulted in no response… such is life. I hope you fared better.
I’m not sure which amp you have but this would apply to an HL-37V. That amp does not have a hard PTT input, all PTT switching is based on RF detection. There is a tiny switch on the back for SSB/FM and all that does is change the time constant for the relay hang time.
You can see it adds a 47uF capacitor to increase the hang time. There’s no SSB/FM bias change over, it looks like the PA device is biased whenever in TX. My thought is someone used it on SSB and the hang time was too short and it was very choppy and they have increased the value of C28 or if they were me, slapped another cap in parallel on the back of the board.
Check the switch (if there is one) and then check for mods/bodges on the board.
Thanks Andy - It is an and I also looked at the circuit digram last night, but decided that the couple of glasses of red wine were not conducive to going further…
Today I looked inside and expected to find about 40 years worth of bodging. (I am assuming it was made in about 1985) and … it was perfect inside the box with no sign of anyone else opening the box at all in the last 40 years. Not only that but there was a clearly labelled circuit board with components big enough to see - even without glasses on! The capacitor was labelled, had nothing else in parallel and was even labelled 4.7 so…
.., a bit more investigation required… Was it the FT-817ND (which didn’t do it on FM) or is the capacitor just a bit too big?
Meanwhile I have got the Ukrainian transporter board back out to finish my plan B ( - which hopefully will be a bit lighter - and visible without glasses! ) Thanks Andy 73!
