[CQ-Contest] Handheld rcvrs as signal quality monitors

[W1HIJCW at aol.com]

Part of a recent thread on signal quality reports raised the idea of using 
one of the several available handheld "communications receivers" as monitors. 
I happened to have access to one of these through work and took the 
opportunity to try it out for this purpose. 

It was an Alinco DJX10K (the export version of the DJX10T) which covers 100 
kHz to 2 GHz and is an all mode receiver. I used it in the shack both with 
and without the supplied "rubber duck". All tests were conducted on CW.

I found it to be useful for checking such things as the weighting of a 
xmitted signal full QSK versus semi-QSK or non-QSK. However, because of the 
really wide front end  (no specs are given in the manual, but it sounds like 
about 3 to 4 kHz) and the effect of the squelch (which was hard to disable 
completely) I believe the really quality of the signal transmitted was 
difficult to assess with any real accuracy.

By the way, the only acceptable signal strength was achieved by removing the 
antenna completely and turning on the built in "attenuator" (the manual 
doesn't provide any info on the degree of attenuation). Any other arrangement 
led to too much overload. Even then I had to drop the power on the TS940S 
down to an indicated 5 or so watts to get a clean signal. The sensitivity 
spec in the manual for SSB/CW in the 5 to 30 MHz range is given as 0.25 
microvolt.

While this is only receiver I had a chance to try, I suspect from other 
experience I've had that the others (from Icom, Yaesu, etc.) would give 
pretty much the same results.

Just thought I'd let y'all know ...

73,
Bill, W1HIJ(/6) -- member: Southern California DX Club and
                                       Southern California Contest Club
Newport Beach, CA 
DM13bo


--
CQ-Contest on WWW:        http://www.contesting.com/_cq-contest/
Administrative requests:  cq-contest-REQUEST at contesting.com