HAMFEST CONFAB. The Greater Louisville Hamfest is history, and from where I stood this was the best year for the fest in some time. The crowd was up from last year, and the outside tailgate area seemed larger too.
At the ARRL Forum, I presented the awards for the Section Newsletter and Web Site contests. The Bullitt ARS won honors for their web site, www.KY4KY.com. The Bluegrass ARS newsletter, QUA/HAMnews, was named the top newsletter.
Outside the hour at the forum, I spent the rest of my time around the ARRL booth, meeting and greeting. I only made one lap around the hamfest, mostly because the XYL might shoot me if I brought home anything else. Right now she doesn't mind the influx of eBay purchases as long as she knows there's also stuff leaving the house.
BLAST FROM THE SOLID STATE PAST. Speaking of eBay, I've been trying out another attic refugee HF transceiver the last few days, and I may have goofed big time in the process.
I dug out my Atlas 210x with the slide-in power supply/speaker unit, and I've been very, very pleased with its operation. The receiver is sensitive and has reasonable selectivity. Talk about “basic” rig — there are no bells and whistles on this rig.
I'm listening to 3960 kHz now, and the receive audio is excellent. With 4 watts of audio, I can have a room full of whatever I'm listening to.
I don't have a mic for the rig, so I've cobbled together a D-104 to use with it. I checked in with W4DAN and K4KZA last night with the rig, and I think both were surprised how well it sounded. I'm having some RF on the signal, which may be partly due to the fact I'm using jumper to wire up the microphone. I didn't have any kind of ground on the transceiver either. I'm hoping that some of the standard ground improvements will take care of the RF problem.
I'm a little skeptical of the Atlas slide-in power supply assembly. I may just try the Atlas by itself, powered by my shack supply and properly grounded.
SHOULD'VE KNOWN BETTER. Having gone through this with another rig, I should have been more careful while testing the Atlas. I had been comparing the Atas to my IC-746PRO on receive, and then used the Icom to get my antenna tuner set up so I could then do some testing on the output of the Atlas. In my haste I did not power down the Icom, and I believe the RF output from the Atlas sitting next to the Icom has damaged the front-end of the 746PRO.
The Icom still receives, but it sounds as though the passband is wide open. The received signals are mushy and distorted, and you can hear splatter from other signals on the band. The Icom was fine before my Atlas transmit testing, and I'm 99 percent sure that the RF zapped the Icom's front end.
The Icom's transmit is fine, and I used the rig last night after I checked in with Larry and Danny on the Atlas. The 2-meter part of the Icom sounds fine, but the HF on all bands sounds muddy.
I have e-mailed Kuni Okura, W7JV, about the problem and I expect to box the rig up Monday night and ship it out to him.
I still have my PRO3 in the shack so I'm not hurting for a rig to run. The 746PRO has been one of the best bang-for-the-buck rigs I've ever owned. I've asked Kuni for a quote to replace the front panel; one of the reasons I was able to buy the rig so cheaply was it has a gouge on the top edge of the front panel. It's ugly, but penny-pinching me didn't much care about that. If I can get that fixed while the rig is in Washington at Comtek for repairs, so much the better.
In the interim, I might fire up Old Ironsides, my Hallicraffters SR-150. I still have my Tempo 2020 station too, and I should blow the dust off that table and operate it. Most of my operation with the Tempo has been CW. A couple of weeks ago I bought a second full Tempo 2020 station — the transceiver, VFO and matching speaker — from a motivated seller who wanted cash now. I don't need a second station, but his is actually better than mine. One of them will probably wind up on eBay. I probably should put his gear on the desk and give it a test run. He had offered me the station first at $600, then he halved the price once, then halved the price again. I also have a second VFO I picked up at a hamfest to resell, so I probably should be checking all this gear so I can list it on eBay or QTH.com (and make room for more stuff, hi!).