Ham Shack Upgrade
I am in the process of upgrading the ham shack. I collected a variety of different rigs over the years, most of them vintage. A few months back, I was looking around the Office/Shack and realized they took up a lot of room and I hadn’t turned most of them on in over a year.
So I started to sell off most of the vintage stuff. I got rid of my Heathkit SB-104, and my SB-200 amp. I have couple of old Kenwood Hybrids left to go and a couple of HW-101’s that I plan to sell yet.
Then the other day I realized that I always wanted some modern Kenwood equipment. So I found a TS-790A on ebay and I just got a TS-590S. So as soon as I get them setup, I will have my Kenwood shack. Now I need to sell my Icom 746pro. The Motorola Spectras that I have been using for UHF and VHF will get put in my Scout that I am restoring.
Now I need to redesign the shack so that it is not so cramped and I have a bench area. I think that is what I will do for Father’s Day.
The Kenwood 590S is a top rig and I am sure with all that I have read about it you are going to be shocked with the preformance compared to the older rigs. Do post a review of the radio once you have used it for a while.
Just a quick review, I got it installed on Monday.
I had to replace the backlights on part of the display. Instead of the bulbs, I used 5mm white leds with a 470ohm drop resistor. After I got it back together, I noticed the backlight on the meter is out, so I will have to replace that one too.
All I have done so far is program it for the local repeaters. I am getting great reports on it and it seems to work well. The audio of course is second to none.
I bought a cable off ebay for cat control. Took me awhile to get the usb driver installed correctly and I had to turn on dtr and shut off cts, then it has been working great with HRD.
As soon as I get setup better for satellite, I will post more.