This is the much waited for report for the upgraded TS-930s..the upgrade
board is the idea/invention of Chris Sieg WA3LDI...he himself has seven of
the 930's and he wanted to give some new life to a great radio..In my
opinion the only thing that has been lacking in the 930 is computer
control....well Chris has bridged that gap, and then some......I had one of
the beta test radios in my shack for the past 5 weeks...to test and
evaluate the concept...well to be sure I had my share of pesissism
(sp)...how could any one person be smart enough to completely re-engineer a
Japanese radio that took a bunch of talented JA engineers a couple years to
perfect???
Chris has done an excellent job in this area...I cannot speak high enough
to completely praise his efforts in this area...the beta radio I had was
used in my Multi-Multi contest station during the ARRL DX CW test on the
40m station...I personally used the radio, but many of the ops logged some
time with it also...it performed flawlessly in a fairly intense rf
environment...we used CT 9.39 and the radios were linked with an ethernet
lan...this thing is as bullet proff as any other radio in the shack..we had
three Kenwood TS850's, an FT1000MP, and two 930's one modified and one
stock...computer control is accomplished using the Kenwood 850 setting in
Ct...the radio transfers nicely...to typed freq's or packet spots...a nice
feature is with the dial lock engaged and rit-on...the main tuning knob now
is your rit...a really nice feature...Chris has given variable speeds for
tuning rate..with the dim-normal switch in you get 5 khz per
revolution...with the switch out, the rate drops to an really nice 2.5 khz
per rev...really nice on cw....available are 99 memories to store
frequencies...the a and b memories are individually addressable
also..giving you and additional 16 memories...the radio has stacking
registers to remember where you were the last time, and it will also be
programable for custom settings on power up...ie if you want it set for cw
then you can have it with the band memories to come up on 7.005,
14.005...etc....
The price of this jewell is going to be $259 US...I am in no way affiliated
with Chris or his company...however I will be ordering boards for my four
930's in the near future...Pete Smith N4ZR is in the process of writing an
operation manual...soon to come...for availability please contact Chris
Sieg at the following e-mail address....
c_sieg@conknet.com and he can get you ready to enjoy your computer
controlled 930s...I hope I have addressed some of the features and some of
the points of this upgrade...do I think it is worth it...you bet...I have
loved the 930's that I have had for years...in some respects, I have been
dragging my feet to upgrade to another contest radio, until this came
along...de Rick
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