I worked a little more on the IC-706 Friday night and located a bad ribbon cable to go along with the bad filter. I sent an email to Icom in the wee hours of Saturday morning, so I’m sure I’ll hear from them on Monday (or they’ll hear from me on Monday, one or the other). Since I’m waiting on parts, I moved that aside for getting into possibly building a packet station.
I started with a box I bought at a hamfest late last year. The part of the box that I saw first was a TinyTrak3 chip inside. I saw a Motorola commercial HT second.
So I got into the HT, a Motorola HT90. It had a few minor challenges, like a short when I connected power to it (which was not with the battery, of course). Once I fixed that, I installed the two crystals (which one of the prior owners dropped about $75 on in 2002!). I had to tune it to transmit right on 144.390 (see the image in the gallery with my little test adapter). Once I did all that, I plugged it into the computer and installed and configured soundmodem.
Aaaaand… nothing. In fact, looking at aprs.fi, there was nobody in the area that was traveling. I left it on to (hopefully) get a few receptions on it.
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- Internals.
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- The red wire is the positive power lead.
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- This is the back. Fortunately, positive and negative are marked.
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- New power lead.
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- This is the new power lead connected to the radio.
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- Test coil. This is a number of turns of magnet wire around a piece of CPVC pipe that is hooked to a BNC connector that attenuates the signal enough that 5 watts (and likely even 100 Watts) is safe to connect to my antenna analyzer.
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- Detail of the coil.
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- The computer. Soundmodem works (and the waves stopped when I turned up the squelch or turned off the radio).
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- This is the only packet picked up in over 24 hours. I think it is off frequency a bit.
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- This was my original try on a packet station – a Kantronics KAM+. I think it was affected by the Y2K bug.
-73-
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