I don’t remember for how long I’m out of the frequencies. Kids, marriages (yes, plural), moving house to different continents, jobs, more moves to different houses and places and all kind of ups and downs put me away from the hobby that I love most. In Brazil we have an expression that says “a good kid always come back to the house”. If it’s true or not and even if is the right expression in English, doesn’t matter, but… I’m back!
During the time that I was far from the rigs, the things changed. new rigs with a lot of tech inside, new operation modes, new laws (for good or not) and even the QSL cards. At the time when I was on the air, the Internet didn’t exist and the computers was only to “rich people”. A different time for sure, not better, not worse. Just different.
Now, with the life a bit easier, trips only to holidays, kids with their families and just few stress at work (and waiting hardly to be retired), I decide to return to the air, rebuilding my station. Today with a better balance in the bank account, I started to search for things that I remember from my past, bringing me some kind of nostalgia from that time. On the other hand, I don’t want, by now, to have “computers with a rig facelift”. The new modes are still strange to me and I need to adapt my hands for those things. My key from the past remain inside of a drawer and I don’t believe that it will be retired too soon, even with my rusty hands.
Anyway, some of the pieces that I found and I got are here:
Kenwood TS-850 SAT
This was, for sure, the top from Kenwood before start to change the rigs to “radio-computer”. The 850 is an amazing radio. Great reception and almost perfect transmission (I will tell you why).
But the 850 was born with a congenital problem (solved afterwards) in your “CAR unit”, the board responsible to generate 4 different RF signals. The 4 YM6631 chips in change of the magic just stop to work without any reason and the radio became a paper weight. The solution was change the unit with YM66312 chips.
I had lucky with my 850. The radio is in great conditions aesthetics and functional, and the CAR unit is the new one with the YM66312 chips. During the disassembling to check the internal conditions, capacitors and make a good clean, I could check the board and the chips are there.
Together with the 850, a MC-80 and a PS-52 power supply makes the “station front line” (by now).