[K4RY] K4RY IGate Status
Kris Kirby
kris at catonic.us
Tue Sep 4 23:01:19 CDT 2012
On Tue, 4 Sep 2012, Kyle Owen wrote:
> It appears our dear Alinco 110 has finally died. Although it still
> makes noise, the display is completely toast, rendering it unusable.
> When we first got into the room, it wasn't even making a sound after
> unplugging the speaker cable in the back connecting it to the KPC-2.
> After leaving it on for a few minutes, it suddenly produced static
> through its speaker, and connecting it back to the antenna resulted in
> some slightly stronger static. Unfortunately, it no longer seems tuned
> to 144.39 MHz, so it cannot be used for the IGate at this point. A new
> radio will likely need to be purchased. I am unsure the cause of the
> LCD failure, but my suspicion is that if lightning hit it, more than
> just the LCD would be dead.
Failures aren't uncommon in radios that old. The LCD, speaker, and
squelch were generally unnecessary on the DR-110 or DR-1200. The problem
with the radio was that they got to full power before the VCO had locked
on frequency. And the grain of wheat bulbs burn out.
The Alinco DR-110 or DR-1200 is simple enough you should be able to
"feel" the radio out, assuming you don't wind up in one of 1.23
jitterbillion modes or functions.
I recommend looking into some of the older crystal radios like the GE
Mastr II; the Mastr II doesn't have the documented LO leakage problem of
the Mitrek, and has a 2MHz wide front-end (as opposed to most 20+MHz
wide radios today), so it's fairly resistant to noise, within a certain
span.
Alternatively, find someone with an appropriate split VHF commercial
radio and move the radio into the band. Anything mid-1990s vintage will
be relatively easy. Stay away from the Micor. It's too much work to move
a 160MHz radio to 144MHz. OTOH, I think the MFJ-8621 is about $139 or
so. It doesn't have the helical filters of a Mitrek (but you can cut
those out of the Mitrek and splice them in, muhahaha), but it's "cheap"
and can be ordered with APRS crystals.
--
Kris Kirby, KE4AHR
Disinformation Analyst
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