Tag: Rigs

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TS-450SATMy main HF rig is still the good old Kenwood TS-450SAT. I absolutely love this rig! It looks beautiful, it sounds beautiful and it works great.
The most funny about this rig is, everyone who owned one in the past and see it again on my desk, sighs and says: “I should never never never sold that baby!” Even guys who own a Icom 756 pro III nowadays like the looks of my 450 more.

I’m a quick learner, I never want to sell this piece of equipment too. So I figured, if I never wanted to sell it, I might as well start the hunt for all the available options for it. If I’m gonna enjoy the rig, then please with all its options in it!
So I opened the manual to see what kind of options there are. Actually there a a few of them! Let me publish a little list:

Filters:

– YG-455C-1 CW filter 500 Hz
– YG-455CN-1 CW filter 250 Hz
– YG-455S-1 SSB filter 2,4 KHz
– YG-88C-1 CW filter 500 Hz
– YG-88CN-1 CW filter 270 Hz
– YG-88S-1 SSB filter 2,4 KHz
– YG-88SN-1 SSB filter 1,7 KHz

Other options:

– SO2-TCXO crystal oscillator oven
– VS-2 voice synthesizer (reads frequency)
– TU-8 Tone unit (so you can use tone enabled repeaters on 10m)
– DSP-100 MF digital signal processor.

I opened the hunt for all of these options. I was able to find the YG-455C-1 500 Hz CW filter, the YG-88SN-1 SSB 1,7 KHz filter and the VS-2 voice synthesizer. The only filter I don’t understand is the 2,4KHz SSB filter at 455 KHz MF. There is already standard a 2,4 KHz filter in this rig for 455 KHz. So I’m still looking for the other filters, the SO2-TCXO, the TU-8 and the DSP-100. Would be great to complete the rig!

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Yaesu FT-817I’ve picked up my Yaesu FT817 from the shop the other day. They hadn’t good news for me. After 2,5 hours of working the engineer managed to get it back to life. Well, it received. Transmitting still was broke. It seems that the feds are broken too.
I’ve picked it up because the bill was already up in the sky. Further repair would cost more money then what the rig is worth these days.
Maybe I can fix the feds myself. Until then I’ve got myself a nice receiver!

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Yaesu FT-817It is a very sad sad day. My first rig, a Yeasu FT-817, is broken.
The other day I wanted to turn it on, but it was dead. Shaking the rig gave me all weird noises, so I opened it. Seems that there was an exploded elco in it. All kind of lose smd pieces around the elco. It look a bit like a mess. Actually it seems that there was some kind of shortage in de power.

So I took the rig to the local repair man. All that smd stuff is a bit too new for me. I hope he will be able to fix it… Let’s cross fingers. I would like to have a working 817 for nostalgic purposes 😉