Well, I figured I'll be holed up in my house for the foreseeable future other than going to work. I was in my shack last week and realized my two HF Radios were getting a little long in the tooth. The IC-751 (not "A" model) was given to me broken many years ago. Actually I received two non working 751's and so I made one working one out of the two. The other is an original Icom IC-706 which I bought one of the first ones that HRO got back in the day when I was working there. I think it was around 1995 or 96.
I will probably sell the IC751 but not sure about 706 yet...
Anyway, I took a trip down to HRO yesterday and bought a Kenwood TS-590SG. Some of the customers coming to HRO when I worked there would call them Kenmores (seriously).
So far a pretty nice radio. It's a good weekend to test it out as the bands are pretty crowded being that it's the SSB WPX contest this weekend. The DSP filters work really well.
I got it hooked up to my computer so I can control it with HRD and also hooked it up to my SignaLink so I can get on PSK, RTTY, etc.
There are tons of features in this box...it's going to take me a while to go through the menus and customize the settings to my liking.
One thing I found out almost from the get-go is that these radio's internal tuners can't tune my open wire feedline antenna, even through a 4:1 balun. It could be feedline length anomalies but I'm not going to futz with it. I just put my Dentron MT-2000 tuner in line and disable the tuner in the radio and just use the external tuner. I have found that if I get the external tuner in the ball park, the internal tuner can handle the "fine" tuning if I move too far away from the resonant setting on the external tuner, particularly on the lower bands.
I am probably going to homebrew an Off Center Fed 80-10 antenna when the weather warms up and see if the internal tuner likes that better.
I will probably sell the IC751 but not sure about 706 yet...
Anyway, I took a trip down to HRO yesterday and bought a Kenwood TS-590SG. Some of the customers coming to HRO when I worked there would call them Kenmores (seriously).
So far a pretty nice radio. It's a good weekend to test it out as the bands are pretty crowded being that it's the SSB WPX contest this weekend. The DSP filters work really well.
I got it hooked up to my computer so I can control it with HRD and also hooked it up to my SignaLink so I can get on PSK, RTTY, etc.
There are tons of features in this box...it's going to take me a while to go through the menus and customize the settings to my liking.
One thing I found out almost from the get-go is that these radio's internal tuners can't tune my open wire feedline antenna, even through a 4:1 balun. It could be feedline length anomalies but I'm not going to futz with it. I just put my Dentron MT-2000 tuner in line and disable the tuner in the radio and just use the external tuner. I have found that if I get the external tuner in the ball park, the internal tuner can handle the "fine" tuning if I move too far away from the resonant setting on the external tuner, particularly on the lower bands.
I am probably going to homebrew an Off Center Fed 80-10 antenna when the weather warms up and see if the internal tuner likes that better.
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