Many years ago I had an early model TS-830S; this the result of doing some home improvement work for a ham buddy. The radio and a TS-520S were sold to finance the purchase of my first street bike, at which time I drifted away from radio...for a little while.
The late 80s saw me acquire a TS-820S, then an R-820. An AT-230 followed soon thereafter. Over the years, that tuner was in and out of the shack a number of times. I'd often thought of selling it, but the desire to obtain the rest of the x30 line lingered in the back of my mind.
Fast forward to today. There are several of the rigs plus peripherals and a good sized box of spare boards and parts in my project queue. In this thread, we're going to have some fun modifying and upgrading them.
The 530 and 830 share common DNA, as I remarked in a Q&A thread elsewhere in the forum. The chassis, power transformer, power supplies, Final Amplifier assembly, RF Board (with a couple component omissions in the 530 series), PLL Board and Counter Board are for the most part interchangeable between the series. What's mostly different are the IF and AF Boards. The '830 is a dual conversion receiver scheme which uses an RF speech processor, while the '530's is a single conversion arrangement with an AF speech processor. The 830's SSB TX bandwidth is set by a different filter than the one used for reception, while the '530 series uses the same filter for both - albeit switching in a "Narrow" RX filter at the demand of the operator.
We're going to take advantage of both methods to broaden up the transmit audio a bit, enabling the radios to be on par with today's offerings. We're also going to fix the various IF Board gotchas common to each, improve reliability of the radios in general and add a few cool features - some of which Kenwood already gave us a head-start on. This thread will be updated and edited as I go; feel free to add to it.
References and parts sources:
KE5FTF - hybrid parts (mostly used)
https://kd7dny.com/shop/
http://www.somis.org/830.html
http://www.k4eaa.com/parts.htm
Reply With Quote