… and I thought I had trouble with my tractor's clutch! With the weekend winding down, I'm faced with two additional i$$ues to deal with (both of which will suck money from my ability to chase new radio stuff).
1. Wife's car began “running funny” in E'town on Saturday. She limped it back home ok (does 70 mph count as “limping,” I ask you??). Her car's at the shop now, took it there on the way home. Can you hear the sound of dollars flying from my wallet? (Note to self: Remember again to never buy a car from a family member)
2. The clothes dryer died. I mean dead as in totally, completely without life or motion. I'm betting this is a simple problem, since the dryer is only, what … 10 years old?? It can't have just died from being worn out yet, could it??? Don't answer that! It's a small problem I'm sure … nothing that $300 in the “Appliances” isle at Lowe's won't fix. UGH.
Number 3 we already know about (technically it's No. 1, I know, I know), but even that's on hold until the other two get taken care of.
MORE YAESU STUFF. Since the FT-757GX doesn't have a built-in keypad for frequency entry, you pretty much have to slog through a couple hundred kilohertz to get from anywhere on the 75 meter band to anywhere else.
I'm operating the FT-757GX, just turned it on, and I'm tuning up from the slow cw net frequency (3579) when I hear a familiar voice as a tune past 3710. That 30-over-S9 signal is Larry, K4KZA, who is in QSO with Danny, W4DAN. I copy the mail a while, the go tune up the antenna tuner off the frequency and return and wait to throw my call out.
They're discussing the amp that Larry gave Danny some time back, the Hallicrafters HT-33. There's a safety switch/fuse that's open that's killing the HV, and Danny is looking for a replacement. They talk a while and I finally throw out my call.
We chat a bit and I tell them I'm on the Yaesu. With Larry so close, he's able to give me some excellent feedback on the audio quality. I was running a Heil headset with the HC-4 cartridge, so its going to sound a little “pinched” up anyway.
On the Yaesu I ocassionally hear the passband change on receive. What this means is that I have to change the IF SHIFT AND WIDTH controls to restore the fidelity to the receive audio. But what I didn't know until tonight is that Larry is hearing the same shifting in my transmit audio.
Danny was having trouble hearing me, so I switched to the 746PRO — and wow, what a difference, both on transmit and receive. There was no comparison between the two receivers — which may be partly due to alignment issues with the Yaesu, but part of it is just 25 years of techological advances the PRO has over the Yaesu.
The benefit is that I have that additional information to add to the service report I'll send with it.
I enjoyed the QSO this evening, but it became political, which was OK. I still prefer to avoid politics as much as possible, there's too much other stuff about radio to talk about that a hot-button issue that's basically a very personal choice — particularly in today's politically polarized atmosphere (yeah, I polarize a lot myself, but I don't care to during my hobby time).
Larry has a new antenna up, basically its a shortened dipole fed with a balanced feedline. The antenna is 102 feet long. Larry uses it on 80, 40 and 20 with good results. He was working VKs and ZL's on 20 late a couple of nights ago, he said. Called CQ and had quite a pileup for a while.
We talked briefly about the latest radio club drama. He said he hadn't commented on it because he doesn't attend the meetings regularly. He said he agreed with the points I made, and thought that cooler heads would eventually prevail. That's probably true. Not much more has been said about it — and that's a good thing.
73 FER NW ES CUL … de KY4Z … dit dit