[TenTec] Ten Tec 2m transceiver, comments and impressions

[Chuck Murcko]

Hi all. I just finished putting a 1220/1222 combination on the air. This has
turned out to be a very nice rig, and has one of the best 2m receiver sections
I've ever used. The exception was an old Icom with helical resonators, but
that's another story.

Construction was quite straightforward, save for a number of small hitches.

1) Things get tight at the end of assembly, when mounting the power
   transistors to the back subpanel/RF shield. Go slowly here. Same goes
   for the T-R board assembly.

2) One PEM nut was missing from a side subpanel. No big deal; the rig is
   exceptionally well engineered and solid, especially if the instructions
   to hot glue the VCO coil are followed. Case rigidity seems unimpaired by
   missing fastener.

3) Go easy on the slug in the VCO coil; mine cracked, and I had to clean it
   out and replace it with one of similar ferrite mix from the junkbox. My
   fault.

4) You really have to clip lead power to the 1222 amplifier to align it. The
   input tuning capacitor is impossible to get at when mounted for testing
   as suggested in the manual.

With the amplifier, I measure 40w out at 146.000 MHz and 37w at either band
edge. With a small dual band antenna (Cushcraft AR-270, about 4' tall)
mounted at 18' above ground, I can reliably use repeaters up to 35-40 mi
away, and get about 10 mi further when the band opens a bit on these summer
evenings. Haven't experienced any tunnels or skip yet. 8^)

All reports so far have remarked on the excellent transmit audio and lack of
synthesizer noise (a *big* problem with the old Ramsey kit transceivers).

The receiver is *very* good. No birdies or synthesizer artifacts are audible.
The one thing I thought was one turned out to be a bad power line insulator
outside. Excellent intermod performance and image rejection, too.

Packet and PL work fine. It was a bit odd getting used to having simplex
frequencies in the lower memories (The upper memories are used to store
frequency pairs for nonstandard offsets, so any simplex frequency stored
there is considered as one of the pairs).

Is there a 440 Mhz kit in the future? This would be very nice, though harder
to package for a kit than a 144 or 220 MHz unit.

What I miss on this rig is general purpose scanning capability. Perhaps
something like scanning between any two (or the first two) memory frequencies
could be done in future. I can also see myself running out of memories
eventually, though I've never used more than 30 on any ham rig I've had.
Somehow I can't see the need for hundreds or thousands, myself. It'd be
difficult to add too many more functions with only four pushbuttons on the
front panel.

All in all, the rig took about 25 hours to build and align, working slowly
and carefully, though persistently. No doubt the second or third would go
much faster. 8^)

I haven't used this transceiver in the car yet, so I can't report on that
aspect of use.

All in all, a very nice rig for T-T and anyone with the time and expertise
(you should probably have one other simple kit that uses small parts under
your belt before starting one of this complexity). The stage by stage, build
and troubleshoot as-you-go approach makes the job very straightforward.
--
chuck
Chuck Murcko            The Topsail Group             West Chester PA USA
chuck@topsail.org

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