Despite working at the food booth for the Milford Hamfest, I did get some time to get into the boneyard.  I came back with a few things.

Astron SS-25M. Yes, the price sticker says “Bad”. No power output. It can be fixed – Astron makes some good products, and I’m sure I can find the schematics online.

Footswitch. Dear reader, you didn’t think I’d use the wooden one forever, did you? 🙂

Kenwood TM-201A. Works, but has quirks (some may be by design – like the fact that I have to use an external speaker!). Power output was 6 watts, although I didn’t play with the power level switch to see if it would go up to 25 watts. I do like the slide-out bracket it uses.

Another view of the Kenwood.

AEP PK-232 Packet TNC.

Parts. I looked through several bags and picked ones with parts I really want. The meter was partly to round up to $4, although I’m sure I’ll use it, too.

Not a bad haul.

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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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