Saturday, Jan. 9, 2021
As my small-to-moderately priced items have been selling on eBay since Thanksgiving, I’ve been quietly thinking of my next rig I want to buy.
There are a lot of used rigs I would love to try out for a while … the Yaesu Mark V Field; a Collins KWM-2; a set of Drake twins; a Yaesu FT-990, a rig that’s always appealed to me; a Yaesu FT-767; a Yaesu FT-ONE; Yaesu FLDX 400; Yaesu FT-102; IC-765; Kenwood TS-940; and a host of others.
But one rig I’ve wanted has always been priced outside my budget … until my sales late last year helped boost my radio fund.
I tried to buy a mint condition Kenwood TS-520S station — complete with VFO, speaker and DG-5 and an antenna tuner. After careful study — and making sure the rig had the CW filter — I pulled the trigger … only to have the seller cancel the transaction on the basis the radio was either no longer available or was lost or damaged. The one that got away. Damn.
But then something else popped up that was even more expensive than the TS-520S station — a Hallicrafters SR-400 Cyclone transceiver with power supply. My first rig was the earlier Hallicrafters SR-150 transceiver, which was the Cyclone’s predecessor.
The Cyclone is a more refined and feature-rich version of the SR-150, complete with features that make it a great CW rig (something the SR-150 was not!).
The rig was restored and is in full operating condition, and physically, it looks great. I paid a hefty price, but not outside the range of previous sales on eBay. While the sale did not include the HA-20 VFO, those are exceeding rare collector’s items and rare as proverbial hen’s teeth.
While I paid less for the Cyclone than I would have for a late model FT-1000 Mk 5, I think the rig is going to be certainly be a “keeper.” I’m really looking forward to the station’s arrival, and my plans right now are to clear my operating position in Studio C and put the rig on the air immediately. I will probably leave the IC-756PROII installed, but the Tempo 2020 station will likely go into temporary storage — temporary until I move my desks from my main shack to Studio C.
KNIGHT VFO UPDATE. I have ordered a length of RG-316, which is a very small diameter shielded 50-ohm coax that I’ll use to make the cable between the Knight VFO and the T-60 transmitter. I’m actually considering installing a jack on the rear of the VFO rather than having a hard-wired cable hanging out the back. I’m not a fan of fooling with BNC connectors, so I’ll probably use either a simple RCA jack or an SO-239. Haven’t decided which yet. We’re talking a VFO signal, not a kilowatt, so the main requirement for the connector is that it passes the signal without a lot of attenuation.
73 es CUL …. de KY4Z …. SK …. SK ….. (dit dit) ….