Sunday, June 26, 2011

Field Day until 21:00z!

Field Day isn't automatically over at 18:00z on Sun. Field Day runs until 21:00z for class A& B stations who didn't start setup untill 18:00z, and for all class C, D, E, & F stations. Keep on rolling!

Dave WB4IUY
www.WB4IUY.net

Saturday, June 11, 2011

IC-756 Display fix and 60m added!

I bought my IC-756 back around '95. It has been a great radio, except that the display began to fail a few years ago and Icom would not support it. They came out with the Pro-series 756's, and had no displays for the repair of the $2500+ radio I bought in '95.




I continued to put up with the problem, and it continued to get worse and worse...to the point where I could almost not read the display and had to rely on HRD and a CI-V interface to read some functions and frequency on the computer in the shack.

In recent years, a ham Richard Rosenberger PA7FA in the Netherlands designed a replacement display for it. You can see his display kit at http://www.pa7fa.nl



I was about to send the front of my rig to him to have his new display kit installed (I couldn't possibly handle all the SMD soldering and such), when I got a message from Bob wa8ulw stating that he had an old 756 that had been struck by lightning and that it had a good display. Wow...was I ever relieved to hear this!

Bob and I worked the deal, the faceplate assembly from his 756 arrived at my doorsteps this morning, and it's already on the rig and looking good as new. While I was doing the work, I modified the 756 to add the use of the 60m ham band to it's range of transmit frequencies.



Check out the before and after pics, including the little SMD jumper I had to remove to allow transmission on the 60m band...

BEWARE...this isn't all you need to do to operate 60m on this rig. The bandpass filters don't operate correctly on 60m and will reflect a good bit of power back to the PA...could cause damage it you operate there much. I did a bit of work to fix that, see this info in my blog at: 

http://wb4iuy.blogspot.com/2014/03/updated-60m-mods-for-icom-ic-756.html


Dave WB4IUY
www.WB4IUY.net

BAD storm & June VHF Contest

Wow... while getting ready for the June VHF contest this weekend, we had one heck of an electrical storm tonight (Fri, June 10th). Multi-discharge lightning strikes all around us, some so close there was no delay between the flash of lightning, crack of the air, and the BOOM from the thunder. Thank goodness I had disconnected everything in the shack prior. The power was out for a while and we were running on our whole house generator.

It's now 1:30am June 11th. The storm has finally passed, leaving cooler temps and over 3" of rainfall behind. You can see my weather station online, along with the weather data archives from my location, at http://207.126.49.184/wb4iuy/radio/wb4iuy5b.htm .

Have all of my gear reconnected, all antennas tested, and ready for the contest! You can see the rules for the test at http://www.arrl.org/june-vhf-qso-party . Hope to see you on the air on 6m or 2m during the test!

Dave WB4IUY
www.WB4IUY.net

Monday, June 6, 2011

6m improving quickly!

Nice to see such great activity on 6m these recent days. Along with working all around the USA, I've been making contacts all over the eastern half of Canada, and down into the islands such as Turks & Caicos, Cayman Is, etc. Get your rigs on 6m and keep the squelch open to hear the weak ones, it looks like we're going to have a great summer. Oh, BTW, don't forget the ARRL VHF contest this coming weekend!!