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

[K0VAR Jack Kovar]

	Chuck,

	Great to hear of your luck with 1220.

	The baby powder on slug and coil would have helped.

	I found transmitt audio to have a low level crackle.

	Fix was to reroute b+ power a few cm away.

	Transmitt audio with adjustment at max is still weak.

	Never did fix that.

	My 5 watt version produced a maximum of 3 watts even after bending

	and remaking output coils.

	The worst problem is rf immunity.

	When I fire up the Titan I reset all the memories back

	to 146.52 mhz. I installed it into the car and lost memories in

	less than a week.

	I live about 10 miles from a populated broadcast transmitter site.

	I have noticed signal mixing in the 1220 that interferes or

	causes high squelch sitting to bypass noise.
		
	I dislike the waist of memories allocated to split operation.

	It is a great packet radio.

	Receive audio it very full and plesant, Just bit of extra ringing.

	Like audio stage is at upper gain end of design.	

	I was plesant to program in it's simple way.

	and it's default to 146.52 was a wonderfull idea.

	A bit too wonderfull as time goes on loosing memories.

	My wife build this 1220 with my over looking.

	It was a great experience for both of us.

	I was planing on putting it in her car.

	I simply do not trust memories and dislike low transmitt audio.

	We will never part with her 1220 rig.

	We keep ** 

	

	

On Wed, 25 Jun 1997, Chuck Murcko wrote:

> 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
> 
> --
> FAQ on WWW:               http://www.contesting.com/tentecfaq.htm
> Submissions:              tentec@contesting.com
> Administrative requests:  tentec-REQUEST@contesting.com
> Problems:                 owner-tentec@contesting.com
> Search:                   http://www.contesting.com/km9p/search.htm
> 

--
FAQ on WWW:               http://www.contesting.com/tentecfaq.htm
Submissions:              tentec@contesting.com
Administrative requests:  tentec-REQUEST@contesting.com
Problems:                 owner-tentec@contesting.com
Search:                   http://www.contesting.com/km9p/search.htm