Saturday, June 18, 2022
With Field Day just a week away, I’ve decided to pull out an old favorite rig and make it my main rig for Field Day operation — an Icom IC-756PROII. Its pretty amazing at the prices the PRO series of rigs continue to command on eBay.
But with my PROII just sitting on the floor under the operating position, I thought I would fire it up and make good use of its features, particularly the DSP.
My lack of recent experience with the radio cost me some operating time, however. I plugged my Bencher in the rear key port, but couldn’t get the key to work as an iambic key! WTF?? Of course, it was operator error — the front of the rig has a port labled “electronic key,” which is where you have to attached your iambic key. The rear port is a simple keying line for a bug or straight key.
I’ve been using the rig to check in on my Georgia CW traffic net, and tonight I had to use the CW-R feature because of an interfering signal.
I had hopes of hooking up a Signalink interface to the rig so I could run RTTY this weekend, but it doesnt look like I’m going to reach that goal. The truth is I’m only going to be operating Field Day late in the day — our local car club has its monthly cruise-in event on Field Day Saturday, so I’ll probably not even make it to the shack until 8 or 9 p.m. We’ll see.
BENCHER KEY REPAIRS?? Yep, one of my Bencher keys took a hard fall off the desk to the floor, and I wound up with my key having bent screws that secure teach of the keying levers to the center of the base. The screws are bent so badly, you can’t operate the key. I manage to adjust one side and got it operating (barely), but the other side is trash. I have ordered replacement 4-40 machine screws to replace the damaged ones.
73 es CUL …. de KY4Z …. SK … SK …. (dit dit) ….