Anti-Kenwood rant

This is a really good thread, I have found much of what the autor has discussed in my 820.
I might point out; having worked on Kenwood stereo gear I find the construction practices to be much the same including the tacky treatment of mains power.

In my own thread in the Homebres and Mods section I will post my experiences with reworking the 820 VFO which I am a little disappointed with.

Really who in their right engeneering mind would put ALL the inductance in a VFO tank on a slug tuned form.

They only do that in tailor parks.

Hello.

If somebody came up with a DDS module that was small and generic (programmable) enough it would be a really neat upgrade for a lot of the older radios.
The trouble with older radios is both drift and crystal availability.
This would be so neat, swell even.

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Originally Posted by KA5PIU

Hello.

If somebody came up with a DDS module that was small and generic (programmable) enough it would be a really neat upgrade for a lot of the older radios.
The trouble with older radios is both drift and crystal availability.
This would be so neat, swell even.

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Have a look here:

http://www.amqrp.org/kits/dds60/

http://www.amqrp.org/kits/dds60/dds60-top(400).JPG

All that's missing is a controller to transceive a 40-bit control stream (5 bytes total) and you're good to go.

I've looked into doing this with a PIC and with a BASIC Stamp. I actually have a working prototype put together with the latter; it uses a Grayhill optoencoder in quadrature-output mode for determining direction and rate of tuning. The Stamp I'm using has a clock frequency of 20MHz, which puts its oscillator right smack in the middle of the HF band...something I'm not too happy with. Thoughts are to use the BS2px (shown below) which has a 32MHz clock in place of the original unit. I don't know how much code I'm going to have to modify, though.

http://www.parallax.com/Portals/0/Im...BS2PX-IC-M.jpg

Both of these boards can be tucked into a very small space. The Stamp also allows me to emulate the K3 or TS-570 protocol for computer-control purposes, which is something you cannot easily do via a PIC-based controller.

The circuit I've come up with also uses an 8-bit serial ADC to implement RIT. Given 256 possible values, I can get +/- 1.28KHz adjustment if I tune in 10Hz steps. Another ADC can be used to read the AGC voltage through a buffer and thereby supply the controller program with an "S"-meter readout ... :yes:

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Originally Posted by N8YX

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Originally Posted by KA5PIU

Remember, Amateur Radio equipment is built to a price.

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And that is exactly what did Drake and Cubic in.

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Actually, in Drake's case, I believe the cause was the company founder (a ham) died, and the kids had no interest in the market.

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Originally Posted by W5GA

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Originally Posted by N8YX

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Originally Posted by KA5PIU

Remember, Amateur Radio equipment is built to a price.

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And that is exactly what did Drake and Cubic in.

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Actually, in Drake's case, I believe the cause was the company founder (a ham) died, and the kids had no interest in the market.

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Ahhh....no.

One of my coworkers is ex-Drake; he was involved in the TR7/R7 and TR5 projects and a lot of their satellite stuff. Management realized two things during the early to mid 80's: Fabrication costs - keeping the quality standards relatively high - compared to the Japanese sets really cut into Drake's bottom line; 2) The ham community at large was beginning to shun the 'Made in America' labels in favor of the all-in-wonderboxes. This is why the surviving clan "...had no interest..." in pursuing further ventures in the amateur market. Money is money, and if the amateur equipment market would have have been as easy to turn a profit as the satellite receiver market was at the time, they would have stayed in the game.

The decision to exit was purely business, not lack of interest.

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Originally Posted by W5GA

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Originally Posted by N8YX

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Originally Posted by KA5PIU

Remember, Amateur Radio equipment is built to a price.

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And that is exactly what did Drake and Cubic in.

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Actually, in Drake's case, I believe the cause was the company founder (a ham) died, and the kids had no interest in the market.

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Don't think so....

This is from an article by Bill Frost:

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The postponed, but eventual decision was made to cease production of amateur radio equipment. The market had all but disappeared, there was a lack of FCC deregulation, the foreign competition was increasing more and more, and the dollar was strong.

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Here: http://www.hamradio.no/la3tq/drakehis.htm

In fact, the R8 receiver was still produced until 2005 - 30 years after R.L. died.

The Drake Company today:
http://www.rldrake.com/index.php