Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2020
Last night I cleaned up the Tempo 2020 that I rescued from our attic a few days earlier. The radio cleaned up nicely.
The parts Tempo 2020 I purchased arrived Monday, so I unboxed it this afternoon and hauled it upstairs. Other than being mighty dusty, the rig is complete; the seller said the problem with the rig is probably the plastic gears in the switch/tuning mechanism. I haven’t checked it out yet, but there’s a guy who sells a complete set of those gears, and while its a little involved process to get down to the gears, the process of replacing them and getting everything realigned is not overly complicated. So yeah, I’m thinking of pulling the parts rig apart to inspect the gears to see if there’s a really problem there.
And speaking of Tempo 2020 … I don’t know where the original power cord went to, so I took the power cord from the parts rig and decided to fire up the rig. Oh Lordy, the rig came right on and it sounds fan-damn-tastic!
Its a little ironic … my shipment from DX Engineering — my Yaesu FTDX-101MP, and assorted Heil accessories and antennae — arrived today. So I have the best rated receiver currently in ham radio in my foyer, and I was upstairs in Studio C, thoroughly enjoying a transceiver that was state-of-the-art 45 years ago!
The only faults so far with the rig is the S-meter is very stingy and needs adjusting, and the bias for the finals seems low, though I easily was able to get 100 watts plus out on 80 CW.
I have enjoyed the Tempo 2020 I have in the shack, so it wasn’t a surprise to me to rediscover how much I enjoyed operating the Tempo 2020 I recovered from the attic. I decided I would check into my CW traffic net with the rig, but first I had to come up with a CW keyer and cabling.
The 2020 uses RCA jacks for nearly all inputs and outputs, and I didn’t have a cable with RCA plugs on each end. I saved the end off of a cable I cut off and then attached it to an RCA cable I had set up for one of my bugs. I had to buy a 9 volt battery for my MFJ-422. This is the Bencher BY-1 iambic key with the MFJ box added to that key with an internal keyer that operates from either an external DC supply or a 9 volt battery internally.
My MFJ-422 is one of the early one; it originally was equipped with the Bencher key, which I later removed and replaced with MFJ’s Bencher knock-off.
The MFJ-564 paddle never seems to work as reliably as an authentic BY-1, but it worked fine with the keyer. The key is fine, but it seems more prone to the paddles getting sidegoggly on you. Maybe MFJ has improved the key since I bought mine.
The Tempo 2020 lacks an internal keyer, but it the rig has a 600 Hz CW filter as standard equipment. Checking in to the CW traffic net, it felt like getting reacquainted with an old friend using the Tempo 2020.
I think over the next few days I’m going to put the “parts” Tempo 2020 on the bench to see what issues I can find. My plan was to scavenge the top panel from that rig to go with my attic 2020. I’ll clean the parts rig up and then see where we are after I check it out.
PARTS IS PARTS. Tonight on eBay, I ordered a simple CW keyer to run with the 2020 so I can use one of my other iambics and not have to keep feeding batteries to my MFJ-422. I also ordered some cables with RCA plugs on each end.
CLEAN UP! CLEAN UP! As mentioned elsewhere, I absolutely HAVE TO clean up the shack prior to unboxing my new equipment. Tomorrow I’m going to shop for some plastic storage totes to store my “stuff” in from the shack. Its a variety of “stuff” too — bugs, keys, radios, HTs, cables, etc., etc.
I have some outside work to complete too — I need to trim some bushes from behind the garage so I can mount my 6-meter vertical.
73 es CUL … de KY4Z … SK … SK (dit dit ) ….