Subject: Tokelau Is. 10W SSB on my K2!
From: Jeff Grudin (grudin@vdbs.com)
Date: Mon Oct 11 1999 - 03:36:04 EDT
I thought that would get your attention. Well I got good news and bad news. I'll give you the bad news first. None of you will be the first to contact Tokelau Is. with your K2 on SSB (unless Wayne or Eric has and hasn't told me). I was the first tonight on 17 Meters. What is amazing is I have been trying for a couple of days on CW, but couldn't get through the pileups and with them working EU mostly. Then I was able to get through on SSB working split in a pretty good pileup. Now, the good news, The SSB adapters are coming. I saw them with my very own eyes. The noise blankers and 160M adapters too. I picked up my SSB kit on Sat afternoon. After bugging Eric every day on his repeater, he finally caved. My XYL and harmonic were in a concert that evening, so I was unable to work on it until today. It took about three hours to build the board. It is really cool and only 4 toroids to wind! (OK two are transformers). Wayne has done a great job again of writing a manual that walks you through putting it together. Eric has tweaked it to perfection. I made a bunch of other changes while I had my K2 apart (one was the zero beat detector, thanks Jerry and Tom) , so I would estimate it will take another hour or so to do the work on the front panel. The new firmware lets you drive it pretty comfortably up to 15W, and you can read the BFO Frequency directly when setting those filters. It should be way easier now. But the sideband adapter is really cool, and I don't even like sideband that much. But now I can play when those SSB spots show up on the reflector. It activates the VOX and a tracking ALC functions. It has compression at variable levels, variable mic gain, and much more. I used an old Kenwood 2M mobile mic. The setup was easy and it works great. The old Kenwood gave it 8V, but as Wayne said, it works fine at 5V. The Dwn button changes from VFO A to B. So get ready....Here they come and it was worth the wait. -- 73 de AC6KW <mailto:grudin@vdbs.com> Jeff Grudin, DVM Web Add: http://www.vdbs.com/~grudin Ocean Animal Clinic / Cat Clinic of Santa Cruz - Santa Cruz, California Norcal QRP #1292 QRP-L #16 ARS #351 AR Qrp #131