WDØDXD

Spent the last week or two working out some of the kinks on the G59.  I had run PSK-31 and JF65 and I was having really great success.  Made close to 100 contacts in a two week period and was getting great reports on my signal.

I had a few nagging problems the biggest being that at the start of transmission and end of transmission, I would get a HIGH SWR alert on the software.  It didn’t seem to be actually be high swr on the meter or on my external meter, so after awhile I just kind of ignored it.

Then I decided it was time to move forward and try and make some SSB contacts.  I ordered a Heil Proset 6 and when it came in, I thought I would be in business.  No such luck.

Every time I would try to transmit, the mux indication would come on and the SWR ALERT would show up and I would have no output.

To make a long story short, I spent the next three days trying to figure out what was going on.  With the help of Bruce and a couple of other people on the Yahoo Group, I finally figured out that I hadn’t completed the jumpers on the mic preamp circuit and since the Heil uses a HC-6 element which is dynamic, I needed to install a 1 uH blocking capacitor.  I built a little adapter with the blocking cap in it and viola, everything works great.

I made several contacts using SSB to Oregon and Nevada.  I received very good audio reports from both.  Really enjoy working with the kit.

It’s been almost a year since my last post.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to keep doing a blog.  I seem to get all excited and work on it for a couple of weeks and then life comes and smacks you in the face and it takes you a year to recover.

I won’t go into any personal details, but will give you a quick update on my ham activities.

First, the last few posts about the ham shack upgrade/redo.  Just ignore them.  I enjoyed it for about 11 months and then we decided that someone else in the house needed to have their own bedroom.  So the ham shack has moved out into the garage into my office.  While I enjoyed having the shack in the basement, it has worked out being in my office.  When I have a little down time from the business, I can turn around and work JT-65 and now JT-9.

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I have been busy blowing up the Ham Shack and re-building it this summer.  More on that later.  

One of the primary goals in doing this, was to make sure as much as possible everything in the shack served a purpose and got used.  We live in a small house and space is at a premium.  I looked around the shack this spring and realized that all but a few things I had in it where basically just for decoration.

One of those “Things” was an old Astatic D-104 Mic.  I got it when I purchased a Heathkit HW-101 about 3 years ago.  The PO threw the mic in since I didn’t have one for the HW-101.  I kept it because the XYL and one of my daughters thought it looked “Cool”.  Well if I could get them to show at least some interest in may obsession, I wasn’t going to complain, so it just sat on the desk.

So, I decided to see if I could make it useful again.  It wasn’t wired to work on any of my new Kenwoods and from what I researched, the original mic elements where pretty tinny and this one had been replaced at one time with only god knows what.  I did a little more research and found the Heil Sound made a retro fit kit to put one of their elements in the D-104.  I was excited about that and went to all the usual sources to order one.  unfortunately, no one had one and one site said it was discontinued.  I then went to Heil’s website and sure enough, I couldn’t find it listed.

So in desperation I emailed Heil and asked if I could at least by the components to rebuild the d-104.  I was surprised to get a response back almost immediately from Bob himself.

“Allen