[K4RY] K4RY IGate Status

[Kris Kirby]

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