I know I’ll probably have more work to do on this rig before I put it on the air, but I wanted to know what I’m dealing with and see if there was any hidden damage from the exceedingly poor packing and delivery job done by FedEx. The power supply was apparently recently done, since it has a new board that essentially replaced all of the “guts” and is wearing a “HP-23D” marking – the sign of an updated power supply. I went ahead and plugged everything in, using my own SP-23 speaker since the SB-600 doesn’t have a plug on the end of the cable yet. I switched the power on and held my breath… and then let it out. No smoke, no screaming, all the pilot lamps came on. After half a minute or so I heard the very welcome sound of static from the speaker – the radio is alive!
Not seeing any obvious signs of distress, I checked the meter positions. High voltage was at 800 V as it should be, no other meter indications. I started going through the receiver alignment steps. A lot of the coild took some adjusting, though not a lot. I did find one “problem child”; the coils for the 28.5 and 29.0 MHz bands would not adjust, and it felt like there was something loose under the coil cover. I decided to leave it and come back to that later.
Toward the end of the process I turned the function switch to CAL and located the very strong calibration signal. No indication from the S meter, which I was able to fix by cleaning and eventually re-soldering the meter zero pot. With that fixed I got S9 +20 as expected. Switching to 40 meters, though, required significant retuning to find the marker signal. Hmmm. LMO? Something else? I made a note to chase that down and moved on.
Eventually I connected a random piece of wire a few feet long to the antenna jack and looked for a signal. 20 meters around the FT8 frequency is almost always a safe bet during the day, and so it was. I could hear some CW and FT8 as I tuned across the lower end of 20. Oddly, I guess it didn’t occur to me to switch to USB and move higher to listen to some SSB. Hmm.
After doing some more research and seeing a message thread on QRZ.com regarding crystals drifting as they age, I checked the heterodyne oscillator on each band. All are within .5 or .6 kHz of the expected frequency, with the exception of 40 and 80 meters. The 40 meter crystal is about 1.2 kHz low; I can live with that – though I may try a little series capacitance to “pull” it back closer to spec. 80 meters, however, is off by over 12 kHz. Of course a 12.395 MHz crystal is nearly impossible to find now. I did make contact with Steve, KW4H on QRZ, and he’s very graciously sending me one that’s closer to spec and can be pulled back on frequency.