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The SB-101 Tuning Dial Drive – Again

When I bought my SB-101 back at the beginning of this year, I found that the drive arrangement for the main tuning dial was damaged in transit due to an exceptionally bad packing job done by a FedEx shipping store. In hindsight, if I’d known what a problem this would turn out to be I’d have filed a damage claim. None of the parts, of course, have been made for many years, and finding replacements is difficult to impossible without buying another radio and parting it out.

The dial drive consists of two special phosphor bronze disks with a tiny spacer between them. These pinch an aluminum drive ring attached to the plastic dial. One of the disks was cracked when I got the radio, no doubt from the same impact that bent the tuning knob. I tried a number of fixes for the slipping drive. First was an O-ring, which worked wonderfully… for a few days, then it started slipping as well. After a few attempts to get the solution to work reliably, the crack in the broken disk eventually grew to the point where the disk came apart completely. I replaced it with a disk made from cork and rubber gasket material for a friction drive. That worked, albeit with a little slippage once in a while, until I started using the rig in earnest. The combination of time and use eventually made the slipping problem intolerable.

I’d been scouting eBay and the ham for sale forums for a solution. I was hoping for an SB series radio – any of them at all – that had an intact and working dial mechanism, but the rest of the rig in bad shape. I’d love to find one at a bargain price at a hamfest, but so far that hasn’t happened. Finally I found an auction for an SB-101 bezel with the tuning knob and attached dial drive parts. Beat up, scuffed, a little corroded, and probably missing a part or two – but it had what I needed, and wasn’t terribly expensive. I bought it.

As I suspected, it was missing parts. Both of the drive disks were there, though the two spacers were gone. When the gasket material finally failed completely, I pulled the bezel off and replaced it so the rig now has a properly assembled, complete drive mechanism.

The difference was immediately obvious and is amazing. Tuning is now perfectly smooth, with absolutely no slip or backlash. Tuning SSB stations is a breeze (at last).

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Road testing the new shack

Last night and today I’ve been doing a little operating from the new desk. I got the PC installed so I have computer logging. The paper logbook served me well 25 years ago, but time marches on. I like the occasional additional detail recorded in the paper log, but I like the “low friction”, as they say now, of QLog. I’m still learning my way around it.

Since the second monitor was broken and returned, I decided to try operating with a single monitor. After half an hour I decided that a single, 27″ 4K monitor is enough for the time being. I’ll return both of the dual monitor mounts – they suck anyway. I also abandoned the KVM switch I planned to use. I had it in my office to share the keyboard, mouse, and monitors between my work laptop and my personal PC. I was going to install it on the operating desk in case I wanted to connect a mini PC or Raspberry Pi temporarily. I’ll just leave an empty HDMI cable and use it if and when I need it. Way less cabling, less hassle, and I’m finding out that half the stuff I was using for video won’t work with a 4K monitor at 60 Hz. So screw it! I don’t really need it anyway, I’ll just run a single DisplayPort cable from the PC and leave a spare HDMI cable connected in case I need it. Would it be nice to have two screens for logging, web browsing, and all that? Maybe, but it’s not worth the extra hassle.

I ran FT8 last night with the FT-1000 on 40 and 80 meters with moderately good results. I actually worked several European stations on 40 meters, which surprised me a little. This morning I warmed up the SB-101 and have been working POTA stations on 20 meters off and on all day. I like it. The tuning procedure is easy with the LDG switch, and most of them hear me on the first call. I have the three radios on a 4-way passive audio switch, using the SB-600 as the station speaker for everything. That works great too. Switching from one position to another only requires one button push for the speaker switch, and one turn of the antenna switch knob. I can move the desk chair left or right to be in front of whichever rig I’m using, and the desk is deep enough that I can have the keyboard, mouse, straight key (attached to the HW-16), CW paddle, and even a soldering iron on it when needed, without crowding the rigs. Aside from the all concrete environment, this is working out pretty nicely. It’s by far the best ham shack setup I’ve ever had.

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Good news, bad news…

The good news: The new shack is coming together, slowly. The equipment is in place and largely cabled,, though I do have a lot of cleanup and organizing to to on the cabling. Right now it’s a rat’s nest behind the equipment and the desk, which I really want to avoid. However, I’ve done some listening and moved a few things around to improve the work flow for the different rigs. I think if this as three separate stations; the FT-1000, the SB-101, and the HW-16. Three operating positions, in different parts of the desk, with different goals.

I also fired up the HW-16 and tested it on 80, 40, and 15 meters. Reverse Beacon Network spotting stations heard me on all three bands, so that’s good.

The bad news: The fancy monitor mount is kind of a piece of crap. Whoever designed it made an incomprehensible decision to use unequal length sections of the arm that raises and lowers the monitors. Since the two arms and their end links/pivots are not parallel, any time you move the monitors the cross bar tilts so the monitors are not level in any position but one. Their response: “Oh, we designed it to be viewed from one place, but you can adjust the arm to level them”. OK, but the monitor attachments won’t hold adjustment either, so every time you move the monitors at all it turns into a circus act of adjustments to get them more or less level. I’m pretty sure I’m going to return it.

I also bought two new 4K monitors from Costco. They arrived today, yippee! Unfortunately, one had a broken seal on the box, a missing power cord, and a cracked screen. Wonderful.

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New shack coming together

After a few days of cleaning up the corner of the workshop where I’m setting up the new shack, it was finally ready for the desk. I had an Ikea Galant corner desk set up in my home office – an unused bedroom on the second floor. I figured that by re-configuring that desk I could make one very long desk – about 9 feet long and 31-1/2″ deep, with a short “L” on the left end. I’d rather have had it on the right end, but Ikea discontinued that line years ago and obtaining a new desktop is not practical. I spent most of a day dismantling the desk and moving it to the basement, then most of another day re-assembling it there. I also had to source an additional leg from eBay. This desk is very strong! It’s got a frame made of square steel tubing bolted together, supported by some serious T-shaped legs. The desk top is 3/4″ particleboard, laminated with some wood veneer and stained black. In its final configuration it measures a bit over 110 inches long.

I put a four foot long power strip with 12 outlets on the wall behind the desk for AC power. That should be enough for the radios, shack accessories like the SB-610 station monitor, and the DC power supply for the other accessories like the automatic antenna tuner, Morse keyer, and so on. Then there’s the computer and two monitors (unless I power them from the DC power supply; the jury is out on that).

I have not yet decided where to mount the ground bus bar or DC Powerpole block yet; I’d planned to put them on the particle board panel behind the desk that holds the antenna switch and outlet strip, but I’m leaning toward a different arrangement now. I’ll get the coax switch up today and start the antenna cabling, but I’m sure I’ll need to buy some additional RG-8x jumpers – the longest i have are 3′, and the HW-16 at least will need longer than that. An Amazon shipment is due in today with the audio switch, ceiling hooks, and Velcro straps to get the cabling arranged as neatly as I can.

I bought a dual monitor wall mount arm, but the one I received is defective. Its replacement is due in today, and the two new 27″ 4K monitors should arrive tomorrow. I’ve been using a pair of 24″ HD (1024) monitors for probably more than 10 years, since my second previous employer sent them – they didn’t want them back when I left. They’re still functional but old, so they’ll have a new life with family members who can still use them. I’m glad I kept the original stands.

I need to shorten the antenna coax and get a new connector on the end, and get the PC carried downstairs and installed. That will be a fair amount of cabling, since I want to set up the KVM switch so I can, if needed, plug in something like a Raspberry Pi, a mini PC, or my laptop and use the keyboard, mouse, and monitors. I’ve been using a pair of Altec Lansing computer speakers that I’ve had since the early 90s; they work and sound great, but I may go with something smaller. Most computer speakers now are either way overkill gaming setups with subwoofers, or garbage little pieces of crap. I think I may still have a halfway decent little Dell speaker bar somewhere in my old office, I’ll see if I can find that and figure out a good way to mount it.

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A new tuner, and progress toward a new shack

For months now I’ve been struggling with my horizontal loop antenna. It’ not cut to exact resonance, it’s too low to suit me, yadda yadda – but it’s what I have right now. I have it connected (via about 50′ of low-loss LMR-400 coax) to an ancient LDG RT-100 remote auto tuner, but that tuner has struggled and largely failed to find a suitable match on nearly any band. Most of the time it only gets down to 2:1 or 3:1, so I use the rig’s internal tuner to make up the difference. My tuning process on band or large frequency changes is:

  • Disable the rig’s tuner
  • Press and hold the TUNE button on the remote keypad, assuming I’m using the FT-1000
  • Press the TUNE button on the RC-11 remote box
  • Wait for that to finish tuning
  • Release the TUNE button
  • Turn on the rig’s tuner and wait for it to find a match

After a long bout of planning to move the RT-11 closer to the feedpoint, looking for a later RT-600, rejecting the idea of several other remote tuners because they’re really not designed for balanced antennas, and deciding not to buy an RT-100 for various reasons, I decided to try a completely different approach just to see what happens. I pulled the trigger on a used LDG AT-600Pro. It’s a desktop tuner rated for 600W, with an A/B antenna switch built in as well. My plan is ti use that, remove the RT-11 from outside the house, and replace it with a good common-mode choke.

The tuner arrived yesterday, and I set it up just to see how it works. I haven’t de-cabled the RT-11 yet, so I put it in by pass mode for now. To my delight, the RT-600 has no trouble matching the antenna to 1.5:1 SWR or batter on any band I tried from 80 through 10 meters. No using the FT-1000’s tuner, and the AT-600Pro remembers the settings by frequency, so after switching bands it generally tunes in a fraction of a second. It’s almost effortless. I have a lightning arrestor arriving tomorrow that I can use to bridge the two coax runs and get the RT-11 out of the picture, and I’ll wind a common-mode choke from the excess LMR-400 and a stack of FT240-31 toroids I have coming.

I’m utterly thrilled that the AT-600Pro does so well. Now I can run the full 200W of output power on the FT-1000MP Mark V if I want to. Using gthe SB-101 or HW-16 will be easier – I can tune them into a dummy load and let the tuner do the heavy lifting there. I can only conclude that the RT-11 is crippled. I thought it was dead back in 2005 or ’06 hen it stopped working with the flagpole I was trying to use. hen I resurrected it, it seemed to work OK… but I suspect it’s got some sort of internal damage. Maybe a bad relay, maybe a stuck or dead driver line, I don’t know. Doesn’t matter; I can junk it with a clear conscience.

On another front, this morning I finished building the new run of shelves that I’m hoping will be enough for all the storage I need in the workshop. I’m clearing out some old junk, and the new shelves are much stronger and aren’t sagging (and won’t sag, either). The idea is to empty out the shelves currently taking up part of the 10′ of wall space I plan to use for the new ham shack, then move my large Ikea Galant desk from my old office upstairs down to the shack. That will give me a 110″ long, 31.25″ deep operating desk, with an “L” on the left end that’s 47″ by roughly 23.5″. I’ll have a substantial shelf overhead for the network equipment and to suspend a pair of monitors. I should have plenty of room for all of the station equipment without much stacking. I’m really looking forward to being able to have the FT-1000, SB-101, and HW-16 stations all set up and easily accessible. The biggest challenge will be keeping the cabling from turning into a rat’s nest of tangles. I need to give that some thought.

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Baby steps

I’ve been working a fair number of POTA stations lately – I have a Sapphire award for over 75 stations “hunted”. Woo-hoo! Not a big deal, really. Most have been FT8 or FT4 data modes, which I barely count as contacts. Going by the award endorsements, at least 20 have been phone, the rest data modes. Until today, I don’t think any have been CW. One of the reasons is that they’re almost always running 20 WPM or better – way too fast for me. I have, however, been working on a (temporary) solution for that until I get my copy speed back up.

The FT-1000 has an internal “contest keyer”, at least in terms of what qualified in the 90s and early 2000s. Yes, of course I have a few keyers around, but I kind of wanted to be able to use the rig’s internal memory keyer and dedicate my MK-1 to other radios. I bought a cheap-ass but working version of the Yaesu FH-1 remote key pad. The only difference between that the FH-1 is the button markings. Anyway, I set up one memory with just my call sign, and another one with the exchange – “TU 599 NE 5NN NE K”. Now all I need to do is listen to the POTA station’s call sign a couple of times to get it all, and I can use the keyer to send what I need to.

I worked N2DA on 20 meters this afternoon, and got my first CW POTA contact in the log… and my first CW contact using the Mark V FT-1000.

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An Embarrassment of FT-1000s

I’ve been scouting for a replacement for the TS-850 for a while now. Something maybe a little newer, but not one of the new rigs that puts most of the functions on a screen. Call me old, I like my knobs and buttons. I don’t like wading through menu layers to get to stuff I change fairly often. I never did fall in love with the TS-850. It’s a fine rig and all… but it replaced a TS-930S, and while I appreciate the relief from the constant power supply issues, the receiver never has really measured up. I know that’s a high bar to set.

At first I was thinking about the FT-1000 series, Yaesu’s flagship contesting radio from the late 90s through the mid 2000s. The original FT-1000 and FT-1000D was superseded by the FT-1000MP, and then by the Mark V in two different flavors – the 200W Mark V FT-1000MP, and the 100W Mark V FT-1000MP Field. Nice radios, but they’re all 20+ years old. I also considered the Kenwood TS-590SG, a much more modern, DSP based rig. Then there’s the Elecraft K3. A new K4 is nice, but at nearly $7K it’s just not in the cards. the K3 is highly regarded and falls somewhere in the $1500-2500 range, depending on the many, many options and filters available for it. I thought about the TS-950SDX, but pretty much nobody recommends that – it seems like a continuation of the 850 with audio DSP. 

I’d pretty much decided on the K3, albeit a little reluctantly. Some of the functions seem a little more menu driven than I’d like, but it’s pretty much universally loved. I hadn’t pulled the trigger yet, waiting on a deal I liked. What I wanted would cost me over $1K, probably closer to $2K, and I wanted to find the “sweet spot” of all the options I wanted, but at a good price. 

Then someone listed an FT-1000MP for $600, all in, shipped to my doorstep. I just couldn’t pass that up. I bought it. It arrived. I fixed one problem – a dead CAT serial port that took a $1.30 chip to fix. It’s awesome, I love it. It exceeded my expectations. I used it for SSB, for FT8, even some CW. Life was good. Sure, a Mark V Field would be nice, but I was happy.

Then someone listed a Mark V FT-1000MP – as-is, for $200. Wait, what? He was up front about his reasons. He’d had some problem or other, fixed it, everything worked until he closed up the front panel, then the buttons and LEDs quit working. He took it apart again, found a cable loose or something, closed it up, and still had a dead front panel. He decided to call it quits and sell. Well, I’d just been in the front panel of an FT-1000MP – nearly identical – days before, and encountered a very similar problem that turned out to be knucklehead me not recognizing the “zero insertion force” (ZIF) flat cable connectors, and getting a couple of them partially seated. On those connectors there’s a latching piece that has to be pulled out to seat the cable, then pushed in. These things were designed to be assembled by tiny little Japanese girls in a factory, not mucked about with by my giant ham fists. I figured I could fix this $200 rig and have an updated, newer, fancier version of what I had just fallen in love with. So I bought it.

The UPS boxes arrived yesterday. The rig has its own power supply; the 200 W final amp needs a 30 V supply, so it comes with an FP-29 switching 12/30 V power supply. I put it in the bench and, sure enough, the display was OK (if a bit dim) but the buttons and LEDs were unresponsive. It did take longer than I thought to get it working, but in the end I did. It wasn’t a flat cable; it seems to have been just the routing of the high-voltage wires for the display’s CCFL backlight tube. Last night I put it on the air, and I have to say, the upgrades to the original MP are pretty impressive. I don’t know that I will even need to move the extra IF filters I bought for the first rig over to it.

So, now my tiny operating desk has a TS-850, and above it a shelf with an FT-1000MP and a Mark V FT-1000MP stacked on top. A little overkill, sure. And yes, I’m sure I’ll sell two of these rigs. I had been keeping an eye out for a Mark V Field, the 100 W version, because my remote antenna tuner is rated for 125 W maximum, but as it turns out the 200 W Mark V has a convenient menu setting to set the maximum output power to 200, 75, or 10 W. It also has the typical 100/50 W switch inside the rig, same as the TS-850 and the older FT-1000MP, but I don’t know what that will actually do on this rig. I have the radio set for 75W max. Is it perfect? No; it has one mismatched knob from a different Yaesu rig that isn’t obvious but I’d like to replace it some day. It’s pretty nice cosmetically, though, and seems perfectly functional. I spent an hour exploring different features, some I’ll use and some I may not, and there are still some I haven’t tried out. The transition from the older rig to the Mark V is almost as different as going from the TS-850 to the FT-1000 was.

If someone had told me a year ago that I’d have a stack of radios like this on that desk, I’d have thought they didn’t know me very well… but when things line up, they line up, and here we are. Now I just need to get the 850’s ALC issue fixed so it’s working properly again, and get it listed for sale. Then I’ll pull the filters from the FT-1000MP and list that one, along with a few other pieces of gear I don’t need. Meanwhile, I’m exploring a newfound enjoyment of chasing POTA stations and finding new DX countries on FT8 and FT4.

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It’s New Radio Day!

Woohoo! It’s always an adventure to un-box a new radio. In this case it’s “new to me”, but qualifies as “vintage” or “classic”, I guess. I picked up a Yaesu FT-1000MP, manufactured in 2000 – so, 26 years old. That makes it a late production 1000MP, made just as the successor Mark V FT-1000MP was introduced. This was Yaesu’s flagship HF contesting rig at the time, retailing for $2500 in 2000 – which would be just a bit under $5000 in 2026 dollars. It was pretty advanced for the time, with dual receivers, DSP in the audio chain, and quadruple conversion. These were a huge hit with contesters, and the price on the used market has fallen well under $1K for a clean example with no defects.

The radio arrived yesterday from a ham in Wisconsin. I unboxed it and gave it a quick bench checkout to make sure there were no major issues. Aside from a little dent in teh top speaker grille – easily corrected once I have the top cover off – there are no cosmetic issues with it. The display isn’t quite as bright as I’d like to see, but it’s adequate; these old CCFL backlit LCDs are aging out and will all eventually fail. Fortunately, replacing the backlight with an LED strip is neither difficult nor expensive. I did it to my TS-850 last year.

After setting it up on the operating desk, I did some side by side comparisons with the Kenwood. Both seem to have about the same sensitivity; I could copy both stronger and weak signals on both rigs with essentially identical readability. That shouldn’t have been a surprise, really — the TS-850 was no slouch for its day, either. I switched both rigs to the 500 Hz CW filters. The Kenwood’s is an optional crystal filter I had to buy and install, the Yaesu has one installed in the second IF (8.215 MHz) from the factory. It was pretty obvious that the FT-1000MP was a little better – again, both were clear and readable, but there was a little less noise on the Yaesu, and it was less tiring to listen to. Later I figured out that I didn’t have the DSP switched on at the time; turning that on makes it sound even better.

I’ve spent a little time exploring how to use the rig. It will take a while to learn all of the features and functions, but there are already a coupe that surprised me. It doesn’t surprise me that there is a sub-receiver, obviously. I figured that was handy for contesting, but didn’t really see how I’d use it during casual operating. I was surprised, however, by how quickly I figured out that yes, it is nice to be able to tune around listening for other stations without changing your operating frequency. It’s so quick and easy to just hit the “dual” button to get both receivers in the headphones.

Tuning the RT-11 remote tuner is pretty quick and easy… though it will be even quicker and easier when I have a remote keypad plugged in (Yaesu FH-1 or FH-2 or equivalent). That has a dedicated button to put out a carrier at a selectable 10, 25, or 100W power level for just this purpose. For now, I turn off the internal tuner and the keyer, set the RF power control to about 12 o’clock, and key the rig with either paddle. That puts about 25W out to the antenna. When the RT-11 finishes I turn on the rig’s tuner, hit the TUNE button, and while it’s doing its thing turn the RF to max and turn the internal keyer back on. The whole process takes only a few seconds.

So far the only glitch I’ve found is a non-working “A->B” button. This is the one that copies the main VFO frequency to the sub VFO. I do miss that function and I’ll need to fix that button. I’m hopeful that Yaesu used standard tactile switches for the panel and not some dome switch pad. Over the next few days I have some things planned that will require taking the overs off, so I’ll have a look then. (note: This turned out to just be me not knowing that you need to press and hold the button.) On the schedule for this rig:

  • Install the 250 Hz CW filter that I have coming on Monday
  • Install the TCXO-4 module that should arrive today
  • Replace the internal backup battery
  • Check out the front panel buttons to see about fixing the A->B button
  • Get a look at the display and see whether I want to install an LED backlight kit, or DIY a solution
  • Buy or build a remote keypad – this will give me a single TUNE button as well as the ability to use the two 20-character and four 50-character CW keyer memories

I’m pretty happy with the rig. It’s impressive looking – about three inches wider than the TS-850, all of that extra space packed with knobs and buttons. We hams just love knobs and buttons! I like the way it sounds; I like the fact that it’s AC powered so I can remove one power supply from the desk. I’ll operate it for a while before deciding whether to buy any additional filters for it. The factory complement includes 2.4 kHz SSB and 500 Hz CW filters for the main VFO. There are also are are 2 kHz SSB and 250 Hz CW filters for the second IF available, plus 2 kHz, 500 Hz, and 250 Hz for the third IF and 500 Hz for the sub receiver. Filters are not cheap; I want to see what the IF shift & width controls and the EDSP will do before deciding what (if any) I want to install other than the 250 Hz 2nd IF filter I already have coming.

I’ve called CQ a few times, but there are at least two separate contests going on – one SKCC and one not. I did have one guy answer but he disappeared, so no complete QSO yet. I’ll keep trying. With the keyer set at 10 WPM it shouldn’t be long before I’ve got a couple in the logbook. I am intentionally holding off on ordering cables for the Digirig Mobile; I want to stick to CW and phone for a while.

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It’s always something…

The other day I took the TS-850 apart, once again. For whatever reason (more about that later), I was only getting about 50W output on any band in CW mode. I did the ALC adjustments and got it stable at 100W where it should be… and along the way, figured out that it may have been “operator headspace” all along. There’s a CAR (carrier) control that I was suing to set the power, and also a “PWR” (power level) control that, honestly, I’d forgotten was there. I may have had it set to a lower level. Who knows? It’s working now.

I’d had to disassemble a substantial part of the “shack” to get the TS-850 set up on the bench. I had to un-cable the radio, pull the power supply, then unhook the Heathkit HM-102 power/SWR meter and the dummy load. In order to do that, I had to de-cable and move the Heathkit SB-101 and its companion SB-600 speaker cabinet with the speaker and power supply. Those sit on a shelf that I built that sits over the top of the TS-850 and some other gear. It really is kind of a major operation to take something out of the operating position desk, which is something I hope to remedy sooner or later with a bigger, roomier desk.

I got everything done – the power output back up to 100W and I re-installed the TCXO that I’d pulled for some reason a few months ago. I buttoned everything back up and spent the better part of an hour getting all of the gear re-installed and cabled. While I had it all apart, I decided to re-do the cabling. I have the antenna and the dummy load on an A/B coax switch, the input of which is connected to the HM-102, which is itself connected to the SB-610 station monitor. In order to switch from one rig to another I had to un-screw that rig’s antenna coax at the input of the SB-610, and connect the other’s coax. I decided to install the MFJ 6-way coax switch to all of the radios, and connect that tot he SB-610 to make it quick and easy to switch rigs. I wall mounted both coax switches and got everything cabled up, double-checking the connections as I went.

That evening I wanted to try some CW contacts with the SB-101. After tuning into the dummy load, I switched to the antenna and called CQ several times. I could hear a few other stations up and down a couple kHz from where I was, but I had no replies. I decided to switch to the TS-850, so just flipped the 6-way switch to position 1 and tried transmitting. The Kenwood showed no RF out – none. Even with the CAR and PWR turned to the max settings, nothing at all. Somewhat discouraged and more than a little irritated, I shut everything off and went upstairs.

The more I thought about it, the less convinced I was that both rigs had failed at the same time. I decided that I must have messed up the coax cabling, or had a bad cable. I went back down and did some troubleshooting. Starting with just the dummy load on a short coax jumper, I tested the TS-850 – full power out, no problem at all. I then went through the whole chain, connecting the dummy load at each junction and testing for power output. The 6-way coax switch tested good. Then the SB-600 – good. Then the HM-102 – good. Then the 2-way coax switch – Nope! No output.

That switch, an old MFJ-1702 that I’d picked up use years ago, has failed. THere’s nothing apparently wrong with it mechanically, I took it apart and checked for broken, corroded, or misaligned parts. It tests fine with an Ohm meter, no shorts or opens in either position. It does not, however, work with either radio in position A (the antenna) and intermittently fails in position B (dummy load).

Given its age and all, I decided not to try and troubleshoot or fix it. It’s going into the trash, and I’ll replace it with a good quality Diamond CX210A. It’s more expensive than the many options I see from Diamond, Opek, and many others including a slew of no-name Chinesium garbage that all look identical to the MFJ I’m replacing. In the mean time, I’ve connected the antenna coax directly to the HM-102.

Oh, and the reason for the low output on the TS-850? I’m honestly not sure. I suspect, however, that I simply forgot that there is both a CAR control for the carrier level in CW, AM, and FM modes, and a PWR control that is global in nature – it works in all modes, regardless of the MIC or CAR settings. Given that the most I’ve been able to get out of the rig while working FT8 without the ALC kicking in has been between 50 and 75 W, I suspect I may have just inadvertently had the PWR control set to the point where it limited CW output to 50 W. I really don’t know for sure, but I suspect that’s the root cause. Hey, at least I discovered the failed switch now rather than having it intermittently fail over some period of time and potentially cause more problems.

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The New Shack

I realized I haven’t posted anything since early this year when I struggling with equipment located upstairs and all of the RFI and other issues that caused. Since that time I’ve made a good deal of progress.

All of the radio equipment is now in the basement. It’s not idea as far as I’m concerned, but it is what it is. From a practical standpoint it makes sense. I can get coax straight out the back of the house, which makes grounding and antenna installation so much easier. It’s unfortunate that everything is crammed into a very small space. It’s a little built-in “nook” probably intended for study or something. A 51″ wide countertop, 24″ deep (if that); wall cabinets mounted above so it’s a little constrained both horizontally and vertically. A couple of duplex outlets, a phone jack – no Ethernet, and no way to get it there either. Doing any kind of wiring would require major demolition and construction. Just getting RG-8/U and a flat cable for the remote tuner control into that space took a lot, and I do mean a lot.

The antenna is now a 135′ (give or take a little) loop in a triangular shape around the back yard. The feed end is at about 16′; the two legs go out to two maple trees where the wire is up between 25 and 30 feet. Again, not ideal, but it’s what I could manage to get up in the air. A 1:1 balun at the feed point connects the antenna to 50′ of LMR-400, which connects to an LDG RT-11 remote tuner, and from there to the shack via about 35′ of RG-8/U.

I’ve successfully run 100W+ on SSB and CW with no interference with anything else, no RFI in the house, no issues with breakers. The RT-11 doesn’t match the antenna in all cases; on most bands I need to also use the TS-850’s internal tuner. Surprisingly enough, I’ve worked a couple dozen countries using 25 to 50 W on FT8, and one night worked a couple of Russians (grids LO02 and LO33) on 20 meter SSB. Log entries show that 40 meters is almost all US and a smattering of Canadians, with a few surprising exceptions – Japan, Spain, and France. I attribute those to guys in those countries with good beam antennas! Not surprisingly, the higher in frequency I go, the better the DX results are. I’ve even worked a few US stations on 80, but of course that’s pretty clearly NVIS so I don’t even try much.

I have the TS-850, SP-31, FT-817nd, the keyer, and a couple of Astron DC power supplies on the desk. I built a shelf for the SB-101 and SB-600/HP-23. On the other side of the desk is an SB-610 monitor scope I picked up, an HM-102 power/SWR meter, the control for the RT-11, and a coax switch to switch between the antenna and a dummy load.

I am planning a new shack, though. I’m slowly cleaning out my basement workshop and storage area. My plan is to revamp the storage area with nicer cabinets, and build a 6′ long operating desk about 30-32″ deep in one corner. A 4′ workbench will go next to that. I’ll have room for everything, and more room for a straight key and paddle in a more comfortable operating position. Right now things are a little cramped.

I’ve worked a lot more FT8 than I would like to admit, but I’ve also worked some SSB, one SSTV QSO, and even a PSK and an RTTY contact. RTTY and SSTV were firsts for me. None of those are confirmed; the RTTY and PSK contacts got lost in QSB but the SSTV was solid. I just wish I’d saved the darned image, I’m really bummed that I lost that. I blame the software.

Anyway… onward.