Monday, January 30, 2012

BITX20 - 6. Measuring the VFO

Just a small progress update on the BITX.....
A while back i build the vfo part and started to do all the measuring as discribed in the manual....
Unfortunately the value's described in the manual is no where near what it should be....
So i emailed an other ham operator who has build 2 already to see if my value's rang a bell....
And they did :) thanks PD1ED.

I am sure other people will have the same experience... So i will share this info as well.
Or, if you are into yahoo groups, do join the BITX20 group there. It's a real goos source of info.

Current drain, 34,8mA, not 44,4mA

Q5:
E: 7.21v 4.76v
B: 6.96v 4.87v
C: 8.48v 9.88v

Q6

E: 6.36v 3.99v
B: 7.08v 4.66v
C: 8.48v 9.89v

You can see how much the difference is and then, if not told you will start to worry like me.
(These are my measurements, please remember that they can differ to yours as components, testleads and multimeter's have various deviations)

Well , next weekend on to making transformers....

73's
Alex

Sunday, January 29, 2012

A new toy in the shack.. a TS-440 SAT

A few days ago i managed to get my hands on a set which i wanted for quite a while....
Even though i have a "Mobile" TS-480" i wanted a 2nd set just for field days.
The TS-480 is still scratch less and i did not want to make it look used.... So every time we went for a field day the 480 was put in a little case with loads of cloth. You can imaging that this is not an ideal situation.

So i finally bought a TS-440 (obviously 2nd/3rd/4th hand).... Its in very good condition if you keep in mind that this set at newest is 16 yrs old. (at least , i think they stopped producing it in 1996 like the R5000)
The person who sold it unfortunately smoked like a continues chimney together with the whole family, but he sold it for someone else who was a non smoker so the set is not clutterd with nicotine and tar residue.
He was also not really technical and had no idea if it had a tuner. (i wonder if he knows what a tuner is)
As i use a zs6bkw antenna in the field, i do need a tuner....
So i took a gamble and i drove to the other side of the country..... about 100 minutes in the car for a one way trip. And here it is !



And... to be honest, it sounds great.... there is just something with older analogue equipment compared to newer digital stuff.

As the seller was not really the most intelligent person i ever met (not saying he was dumb , just not educated in the HAM stuff) he had no idea what to anser my questions.... i did not bother and bought the set anyway...
So to get my answers... a) any filters inside b) do i still need an IF-10 set ic's for computer control... i opend up the set this morning..... And yes , it has the 2.4 ssb filter installed, no CW though.... and when i opend up the display cover i notices that the 2 extra ic's were allready there ! Sometimes i am lucky... mostly not though :)

So you might wonder is there is some negative thing? Yes there is... one thing is that it has keybounce on the band change buttons... but its minimal... second is that the powercord is SHORT :). so i have to fix that befor the field days :)