[UK-CONTEST] VHF equipment

[Ian White GM3SEK]

Tim Kirby wrote:
>I have an old ft225rd with a mutek board. It used to be the, er, bees 
>knees. The rig must be approaching 30 years old now and really isn't up 
>to the job of serious contesting or dxing.

As the original breeder of that particular bee, I still have the old 
FT221 (pre-225, pre-R even), and the very first front-end board from 
which Chris Bartram developed the commercial product. The 221 has a 
highly customised muTek board and many other improvements.

In its time, that rig was a real contest weapon... but I don't use it 
now. The IC-746 that I presently use for 2m is not a particularly 
high-class transceiver, and it has a far inferior front-end, but 
everything else about it is vastly better than the old 221.

Above all, I would never go back to a mechanically tuned VFO. The 
abilities of a synthesized VFO to communicate with a computer, build up 
a bandmap and operate SO2V are all much more important to me now.

G4ZTR can probably be persuaded to talk about the virtues of using an 
even better HF rig such as the FT-1k with a transverter.

One last point: don't ever buy a 221/225 from an old-time VHF DXer. All 
the "tuning the band" that we used to do in the 221/225 years wore out 
two ball drives in my rig, and finally wore out the gearbox bearings as 
well. The result is about 500Hz of backlash that will make you really 
appreciate a modern digital VFO! The rotary encoder switches for the 
FT290 were also notorious for wearing out. There are no spares for these 
vintage rigs any more, so if you must have one, buy it from an FMer.



-- 
73 from Ian GM3SEK