Unpacking
I started unpacking my station components last night, and this morning dropped my main HF rig off at my brother’s house for future maintenance. I bought that radio at the Mt. Beacon hamfest in upstate New York in 2006, right after I was first licensed, but it has never really worked properly. I was able to receive strong CW signals on it, but there seemed to be something wrong with the sideband filters, and trying to tune or transmit with any power out seemed to cause problems. Since I was living in Brooklyn, though, under difficult station-building conditions, there was never a lot of impetus (or space) to open the thing up and work on it. Without a way to hang an antenna in the air, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to use it once it worked.
Now that I’m in an area much more conducive to antenna growing and station building, an HF rig will come in a lot handier—once I’ve fixed the darn thing. Last week Steve and I picked up copies of the technical manuals for our rigs (he’s got the -767 model) that were on clearance at the local GigaParts, and we’re hoping to get together in the next several days to open the radios up and spread their innards across his kitchen table. He has a new encoder to install in his (the frequency knob has been getting increasingly flaky—also a common failure mode in these rigs), and I’ll just try to figure out what needs to be done to mine.
It’s a good time for that; all that studying for the Extra exam means electronics theory and good engineering practice are much fresher in my head than they were just a few weeks ago.
