Radios, Amps, Other Hardware
This section describes the features of the equipment that is common to most of the stations. Things that are specific to a particular band are described in the pages for the individual bands.
I prefer to leave equipment on though the whole contest weekend. Because many failures occur in electronics during the turn-on surge it is usually safer to just leave stuff on rather than shutting it down. So in most cases don’t turn off unused radio or amps. When using multiple stations all the radios and computers must stay on or N1MM Logger gets unhappy. If you are doing S/O or a non-24 hour per day contest check with me about shutting off or not when you go to sleep or will be off for extended periods. If you don’t shut down just put the amps in standby, turn off the vox, and make sure the auto cq is not running from the logger.
Red Tape – don’t touch! I use red electrical tape to cover switches that should not be used because the equipment is broken or in a state where it shouldn’t be used.
Radios
· Ts-2000
o Keep off hf bands during hf contests to protect front end
o Use to check signals by disconnecting antenna first
Amps
· Amp tuning
o Max smoke
o 50-60w drive for 1500 out
o Band/mode settings
· 2 different hf-2500’s
o ‘red line’ ones don’t have grid protection
o no ‘red line’ means they have grid protection which cuts them out if grid current is >50ma or so. They reset when you unkey so there is no need to cycle power or standby. To re-tune, turn down drive, key up and retune. If its because of a quick QSY or antenna switch to work a multiplier just turn down the drive, make the QSO and go back to where you were.
Rotors
Yaesu
· Stops – All my Yaesu rotors have the stops set the same. Counterclockwise they stop at North. Going Clockwise they go 450 degrees and stop at East. When they go past North the ‘Overlap’ light comes on to tell you they are in the 90 degree overlap area.
· Common failure mode – There is a common failure with the Yaesu rotor control boxes that causes the pointer to stop tracking the antenna or to track it very slowly. If you see this let me know and I can swap out the box with a spare.
· Use of presets – The preset button on these rotors is not all that useful. First, most of the knobs are labeled like the rotor stop is South instead of North. Second, the calibration is poor on them at best. I usually only use them for rough positioning when I don’t want to have to hold down the control bar, then use the manual control for everything else.
· Speed – Keep the rotor speed from about half to ¾ scale. That is usually fast enough and reduces starting and stopping stresses on the rotors a bit.
· Lights – Some of the dial lights don’t work, they are a pain to replace so expect more and more of them to be dark in the future.
Antenna selectors
New custom designed and built pushbutton controllers are on all bands now. These replace the smaller RCS-8v boxes. Instead of a small rotary knob and only 5 selections they have 8 pushbuttons to allow more selections on the stacks.
Right now they have a TX lockout capability except on the SO2R setup. In the M/M setup the radio/amp keying circuit goes through the selector and prevents switching antennas while the radio is keyed.
If you poke the buttons too quickly it is possible to get no antenna selected so watch for that. You can also hit two buttons and get both selected. In most cases this will result in a high swr, but could be interesting for monitoring a band using more than one antenna.
The above picture shows a typical antenna selector box. The labels on all the boxes are included in the band by band descriptions. They are basically all set up the same way, the top box contains a short description of the antenna by height or type. Then there is a box for how many elements of if it’s a stack. Then the bottom box is either the rotor type or fixed direction. The band by band breakdown describes each selection for that band.
Other Hardware
RigBlaster. Shouldn’t have to touch
Foot switches. I have 2 foot switches available, they connect in place of the hand ptt switch.
Hand switches. Each station has a hand ptt switch.
Paddles. Each station has bencher paddles, if you really want to bring your own they should be wired to a ¼” stereo phone plug.
Keyers. Most stations have MM-3 keyers. No memory functions or other stuff should be needed in the keyers, that’s all done with the computers.
Headsets. I have Heil closed ear, boom mic headsets on all stations, and a couple of spare pairs. For listening in I have a couple light weight headsets that can plug into the 1/8” phone jack above the ¼” one on the mp’s.