This afternoon I had a wild idea …. I have my Yaesu FT-817 rig here at Studio B, why not check out 40 meters and scare up a QRP contact??
I set up my tuner on 40, dug up a Vibroplex Square Racer, and began tuning across the band. I found a station with substantial chirp calling CQ, obviously he was running either homebrew or vintage gear. I decided to answer him, and did.
Nothing!
In a few moments, he began calling CQ again. What? Didn’t he copy me calling him?? Time to break out the manual, hi!
On reading the instruction manual, I realized that the rig’s power output was not set on 5 watts, but on 500 milliwatts! No wonder he never heard me!
I figured out the power settings and decided to check out the high end of 40 CW again. The band was getting noisy, and the station I copied was gone. Tuning down the band I found that a CW contest was going on. No thanks. I decided at that point to wait for my CW net and check in then.
Of course, one thing I forgot was the fact I don’t have a CW filter in my FT-817, so its like a 3 kHz wide bandpass even on CW. I have to do something about that, its crazy to work CW without a filter of some sort!
I found that 80 CW was fairly noisy too, and I decided to try something more out of the ordinary — I dug out my RS-918 QRP transceiver.
Well, calling it a QRP rig may be a stretch; the RS-918 puts out 15 watts maximum. Anyway, it took me a couple of minutes to get the RS-918 connected and ready to roll. By the time I had the tuner set back to 80 meters and found the net frequency, they were well down the list of stations checking in. When the NCS called and no one jumped in, I did.
I only run 50 watts with my FT-950 on CW anyway, so 15 watts probably wasn’t much of difference signal-wise. But the rig’s internal keyer worked fine once I figured out the menu settings. I double checked the output level to max sure it was maxed out, which it was.
I’m going to give the RS-918 more of a trial here in the shack on CW. The rig really has a lot of features, including some awesome DSP features. It deserves more use than I’ve given it, so I’ll see what I can do with it.
The rig is really a little pricey these days — some eBay prices are topping $500, but as long as it works as well as it does, its not a bad option to some of the other low-end imported transceivers.
I just picked up an audio filter kit to add to my FT-817, it should help with my CW operation. That’s enough for tonight!
73 es CUL … de KY4Z SK SK …. dit dit ….