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"Bago ako naging ham operator, tambay lang ako sa kanto." "Before I became a ham, I used to hang around a lot at the street corner."

Imahe
  "Bago ako naging ham operator, tambay lang ako sa kanto." This roughly translates to "Before I became a ham, I used to hang around a lot at the street corner." Sometime back in the early 70s, somebody decided to put up a Radio TV repair shop at the main corner of our barrio. The shop would play Beatles vinyls often and soon I go to sitting on the long bench at the shop's entrance watching people go by and enjoying the good music off two baffles hanging on walls of both sides of the shop. In the 60s and earlier, a favorite pastime was to sit at the corner "lamyaan", an elevated wooden platform positioned at strategic corners of the barrio where men would sit around and share stories after a hard morning's work in the rice fields and river vegetable plots (called "tumana"). The PInoy word "tambay" is from the english "stand by". So indeed I was a "tambay sa kanto" I got to know the owner well. He was traine

757

Imahe
  Erwin Hackl OE5VLL said "How it came about: Due to a momentary idea, I bought a defective FT757GX2 on ebay. In addition, there was the statement "Frequencies are displayed, noise comes from the loudspeaker, no test option". Of course, you can get such a device much cheaper than a fully functional one, but it needs to be repaired and I wanted to accept this challenge. First function tests: A first simple reception test showed that the device apparently works, but a station that was well received on a comparison device could not be heard on the 757. It soon turned out that the receiving frequency deviated from the displayed frequency by a few kHz. This made it clear that the crystals that determine the frequency were already showing major deviations due to their age of around 30 years. For common crystal oscillator circuits, this means that the series capacitance must be reduced (parallel to the tuning capacitor). Frequency processing: If you start to “crank” the frequen

A UP ERG DX1UP Howto for installing Droidstar

Imahe
A UP ERG DX1UP Howto for installing Droidstar (formerly "dudestar") on a Win 10 pc to run DMR (Digital Mobile Radio). Jan 14, 2023 Intro This app serves to emulate radio hardware that allows you to talk to other licensed radio amateurs around the world. In this version, the app will use the registered radio callsign of the UP ERG. Station identification is mandatory. Anybody using this app should identify at least once every ten minutes by saying "This is DX1UP delta x-ray one uniform papa" while talking and identify again at the end of the conversation. 1. Download 64 bit build from dudetronics.com 2. Run the executable on your pc (windows might complain but choose "run anyway") 3. In the main tab, specify DMR as mode in the first dropdown list on the right, and choose the brandmeister master server name from the drop down list [use BM_5151_Philippines], and specify the talk group id (TGID) [here you have a choice... this is like the "chan
Imahe
Ring on the FT-77 knob Ring on the FT-77 knob As any rubber shoe or sneaker owner finds out soon enough rubber disentegrates with age but what happened to this forty year old radio vfo knob rubber is really something else. All of them by now have turned into a gooey mess and have to be removed for the radio to be usable at all. In the past, I have seen this happen to rubber belts on cassette tape decks. The problem with the now naked bare knob, is when you try to turn the knob faster, your index finger tends to slide off the knob. Not a good user experience. While I wait for a reasonably price VFO knob replacement I bought a $3 ring (probably pot metal just like the knob itself HIHI) at a sidewalk vendor in U.P. Town Center yesterday and today, I glued it to the old knob which had become difficult to use as my index finger keeps sliding off the bare knob. I used some tiny drops of super glue to tack it on and then used baking soda plus some drops of super glue on top of the baking sod
Imahe
FT-77S  Personal restoration project, a vintage model released in 1982 by the  Japanese   Yaesu Musen Corporation.  Upon inspection, receive was poor and there was no TX at all. I took a look at the IF board and made some service manual adjustment for receive.  And now I can copy stations. After bringing out the scope I started poking around the IF unit and found some TX signals at the IF frequency. This signal is then fed to the RF Unit (shown below).     I then proceeded to checking out the RF Unit and found it had no TX ouput (which goes into the PA board).  So I had to backtrack. I started tracing the signal from the TX IF input J1011 of the RF Unit. Even before I started poking around the RF unit, I had a feeling that the print side of the board  might need reflowing at some places, (this yaesu came out in 1982!). Rather than blindly reflowing suspect joints, I just started tracing signals with the whole RF board upside down (print side up) and hanging in mid air with all connecto
Imahe
Icom  "Nana Yonju"  ( IC-740 ) Repair The radio model is about forty years old. It is a little older and slightly larger than the more popular IC-735. It sits about in between the IC-730 which is compact sized rig and the IC-735, also a compact rig. The 735 sports an LCD display rather than the fluorescent display of the 740 and 730. What drew me to the IC-740 were the reviews on eham.net and other articles on it in the internet. I remember this particular comment by AB4OJ: " IC-740  - $200 to $250 - WARC bands, no general coverage, has IF Shift and PBT,very quiet frequency generation system" in his article "Good Older Icom Radios." (please google the article title.) I read of a defective radio up for grabs and made my mind up to try and get it. Buying a non-working radio is always a crap shoot but is the sort of thing that interests me most because 1. it usually is cheap and 2. it offers a challenge.   These are some pictures posted by the previous owner