A friend brought a Kenwood IF-232C Serial Port Interface to me a while back asking for a little assistance with repairing it. He had replaced multiple components in it but it still wasn’t working properly. When hooked up to a Kenwood TS-850 radio and a computer, the computer could not communicate with the radio or […]
Category: Workbench
Testing the New IFR 1500 Inverter Board Before Installing the FET’s
Update to IFR Inverter Board Recreation Project
The project of building in Inverter Board for the IFR FM/AM-1500 Service Monitor from scratch is moving along pretty nicely. At the moment, I’m simply waiting for a supply of IRF521 FET’s to arrive, at which point I’ll just have to add two of them to this board, reinstall the board, and test the machine. […]
IFR 1500 Inverter Board Project
IFR FM/AM-1500 Inverter Board recreation. The original board was seriously damaged when one of the IRF521 FET’s went up in smoke. I tried to patch it up and replace the burned out FET, but the board is pretty much a “goner.” The power supply is still getting “bogged down” with this board in place, and […]
Now Designing and Building PCB’s In-House
2018 is off to a decent start already, considering that I’ve already accomplished my first personal goal of gathering the “stuff” and setting up to design and build printed circuit boards (PCB’s) in-house. Quite handy for turning designs into actual prototypes and working PCB’s without having to send off the design for someone else to […]
Icom IC-V8000 Repair for KI4KUT
I just finished repairing and testing an Icom IC-V8000 mobile transceiver for fellow ham KI4KUT. The speaker had blown in the rig. This is the first time I’ve seen one of these blow a speaker, and they are pretty hard to come by. There was not one available in the United States, so I wound […]
New Parabolic Reflector Built for Ultrasonic RFI Source Chasing
Using the New MiniVNA Tiny to Test Another 6M Beam Building Project
Sweep Test of Homebrewed 6 Meter, 3 Element beams
I used the IFR 1600 and the return loss bridge to run a sweep of the 6 Meter beams I recently built, and here are the results. On a 10 MHz wide sweep, the peak resonant frequency shows up at 51.2739 MHz. At that frequency the analyzer is seeing -83.7 dBm coming back through the […]
224.980 Repeater Duplexer Tuning Check/Adjustment
I put the IFR 1600 to work tuning duplexer cavities for the first time today. I went back through the BP/BR cavities on the 224.980 MHz KK4ICE repeater. I’m quite pleased with both the service monitor and the cavities. These screen shots show the pass and reject tuning and performance after I finished tuning the […]