TS-520 First Impressions

Wait a minute (for) Mr. Postman

My TS-520 was scheduled to arrive on Saturday, November 1st.  I expected the mailman to show up sometime between 12 and 2.  We had spent the night at my mother-in-law's house, so I headed home for a couple hours alone - to straighten up my tornado-stricken desk and make room for the radio.

So, I straightened, and I waited.  2:00 came, as did 2:30.  When Barb called at 2:45 to see when I was coming back to her mom's to spend more time with the family, I said that if the mailman didn't show up by 3:00, I'd head out.

At 3:05, I pulled out of the driveway.  A half mile down the road, I passed two mail carriers; I recognized one of them as our sometimes-Saturday-substitute carrier, so I turned around.  When I caught up with them, they were both pulled over in a driveway and it looked like they were transferring mail from one vehicle to another.  So, I went back home and waited about 10 minutes.  Still no mailman.  So, I headed back south again - only to pass my mailman headed toward my house.  So, I turned around again, passed him just south of my house, and pulled in the driveway.  I met him at the road and said "I think you have something really heavy for me."  He laughed and pulled in the driveway behind me.  In his back seat was a huge cardboard box, marked "MISC TELCO EQUIP".

I picked it up, which gave me my very first impression of this radio:

It's heavy.

I think it weighs close to 40 pounds.

I put it in the back of the van and headed off to my mother-in-law's house.

The Unboxing

Later that night, back home, I unboxed it.  It was wrapped in a towel (!) and packed in an odd assortment of leftover styrofoam pieces from who-knows-what-other-merchandise.  For its odd packing, it was surprisingly well protected.  I've saved the box and packing in case I need to return the radio.

I set it on my desk and looked it over.  Apart from the missing side door (which covers 5 adjustment pots) and a little touch-up paint between two switches on the front panel, it's exceptionally clean and spotless.  So, what did I do with it first?

I took off the top cover.  Eight snug but easy-to-remove screws later, and then I just had to unplug the speaker (which is part of the cover ).  The insides are as spotless as the outsides.

My second impression:  Although I'm like able to adjust this radio (due to the various tunable coils and pots and such), I seriously doubt my ability to work on this radio.  I've never seen so many wires and solder connections (and even wire-wrapped connections) in one place before - not to mention so many discrete resistors and capacitors and transistors and such.

I flipped some switches and spun some knobs on the front.

My third impression:  Some of these knobs take some torque to turn.  Specifically, the top three knobs on the right (labeled "Load", "Plate", and "Drive") require surprising effort to turn.  They are connected to shafts (seen in the lower right part of the picture above) that extend into the high-voltage transmitter section (under the cover that, oddly enough, says "DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE").  The rightmost "Drive" knob also uses chain linkages to turn three variable capacitors in the front half of the radio.  The VFO wheel (the large knob in the middle of the front of the radio), however, turns with almost zero effort, while still giving just barely enough resistance so that it stops turning when you let go of it.

I flipped through the manual to identify the 5 separate circuit boards I could see.  The manual showed me that there are at least 5 more boards visible from the bottom of the radio.  Sometime, I'll take the bottom cover off and look in there as well.

I hooked the speaker back up and replaced the top cover.  I then located the power cord:

It's got this monstrous 12-pin jack-plug-thing that hooks into the back of the radio.  And it has an ungrounded plug (the rig is designed to be hooked directly to ground through a screw on the back).  This 12-pin jack-plug-thing can also be wired for 13.8 volts DC, so I could hook this to my Astron 35 AMP power supply instead of plugging it into the wall.

Please Don't Arc

So, I plugged it in.  I also plugged in the only antenna I had available in the house with a PL-259 connector on it - my Comet dual-band magmount.  I made sure that the Send/Receive switch on the front was on "Receive" (I didn't want to load up the transmitter on accident!), turned down the "AF Gain" (audio volume), and turned it on.

My fourth impression:  It is noisy.  Lots of hiss.  I'm used to FM repeaters, which sound almost as good as FM radio stations (as Steely Dan would say, "No static at all").  But the unprocessed world of CW and sideband is noisy.  I discovered that I could turn down the RF gain, which would lower the noise and help the signals stand out as I turned up the volume.

I pulled out my handy ARRL Ham Bands chart so I could figure out where to tune.  I started at the low end of the 20-meter band with the mode switch set to CW, and I spun the frequency knob.

My fifth impression:  The narrow CW filter installed in this radio is incredibly helpful.  With its 500 Hz passband, I could easily tune between two adjacent CW signals with just a slight move of the wheel.  It makes it very easy to pick just one signal out of a crowd.  This, along with judicious use of the "RF Gain" vs "AF Gain" controls (along with a decent pair of headphones) should hopefully get me into some quality CW listening pretty quickly.

My sixth impression:  I can still recognize "CQ" in Morse Code; I still can't recognize much else.  My code needs much more work.

I could not find any SSB traffic at all; at this point, I blame the antenna.  I thought that the radio might have some dirty parts related to the "Drive" shaft, because I could get the signal to get better if tapped or pushed on the knob.  I even took the radio apart again and studied it, messing with with the knob with the power on.  There was a tiny bit (less than 1/2mm) of front-to-back play in the shaft.  I scratched my head and started to worry a bit that something was seriously amiss.  Then, I remembered the cardinal axiom of computer networking, and it seemed to apply here:  "Rules 1, 3, 6, and 10: Check Your Cables!"  I wiggled the antenna coax at its plug in the back of the radio - and I found my bad connection.  It seems that, as I was pushing on the drive knob, I was actually pushing the whole radio and wiggling the antenna connection.  Sounds like this antenna needs a new PL-259 plug in any case!

I need a real antenna for this radio.  But, first, I need to test out this radio (both in receive and transmit, and on several different bands) - which I currently cannot do from home.

That story is shortly to be written. :)

73 to all!  - K9MJA

Introduction (or, why buy a 40-year old radio?)

I bought a Kenwood TS-520 last week.  It's about 40 years old or so.  It seems to be in pretty good shape.

So, what is it?  And, why did I buy a 40-year old radio?

A little background.  I first got my Amateur Radio license in the spring of 1986, my senior year of high school.  My friend Fred and I took the Novice classes together; we learned radio theory and Morse Code (5 words per minute).  He was licensed as KA9VAW; I got KA9VDC as my call sign.  That fall, I also passed the Technician test.

I didn't do anything at all with my license.

I hung around the W9NAA club station at college a couple years later, and I listened and I watched.  My Morse Code skills, left untended, had evaporated by this time.  I looked up "C" and "Q" on the Morse Code chart on the wall, and was struck by the sing-song nature of the CQ call.  I said "I just love the way that CQ sounds."  Dr. Moench (the club sponsor) happened to be tuning through the bands at the time and came across a CQ, and said "You mean like that?"  I has too much pride to admit that "CQ" was all I knew of Morse Code at the time.

A couple years later, after I was married, I took a trip with Fred and Dave (KB9FBL) to the Dayton Hamfest.  I picked up a Yaesu dual-band HT, a mag-mount antenna, and a 12V power supply to bring home.  I think I paid $140 for all of it.

I used an SWR meter to tune the mag-mount to a local repeater; I often operated from the apartment using a filing cabinet as a ground plane.  When our college hosted one stop on the annual Sunrayce solar car challenge, I joined a group of other hams in technical support around the campus, working with net control to keep everything going.  I remember meeting Keith, WA9DRO, who was acting as net control, and shaking his hand.  He had two or three radios going and somehow kept on top of all of it.  As I walked away from the net control table, a fellow ham said to me, "You do realize that Keith is blind, right?"  I had no idea.

I made up QSL cards with my own phonetic call sign (Kilo Amperes, Nine Volts Direct Current).  I don't think I ever sent one.  I used to spend quite a bit of time chatting with Ken, KB9BRJ, on the drive into work - as he and I lived about a half-mile apart and would often see each other on our respective commutes to and from Terre Haute.  A couple years later, I lost interest.  In 2001, my license expired due to non-renewal.

Fast forward about ten years, probably to sometime in early 2011.  Keith and his family started attending the church where my family are members.  He and I are both musicians, and we started chatting.  The conversation turned to ham radio, and I mentioned meeting him back at Sunrayce probably 15 years earlier.  I told him that I had let my license expire; he said "well, you should do something about that."

So I did.  Since my Technician license was issued before the spring of 1987, it's a "Grandfather Tech" license.  In order to get reinstated, I only needed to take the Tech test again and I would be issued a General license.  So, in November 2011, that's what I did.  I was issued a new call sign (KC9UYW).  I had given away the HT and power supply some years earlier, so here I was again with a license and with no radio.  Keith let me borrow an HT (an Icom, I think).  Keith is one of the net operators for the local SkyWarn net; he got me interested in SkyWarn, so I went to a couple of the spotter classes and participated in a few weather nets.  I even took the borrowed HT into work during one particularly nasty storm and offered a hail report while watching out the window.  One of the first people I talked to after getting my license was Keith; the next was Ken (now W0THI).

A year or so later, I picked up a Yaesu FT-7800R dual-band mobile radio from eBay, along with a Comet dual-band magmount antenna.  I also picked up an Astron 35M power supply so I could use the radio from home.  I made a couple twin-lead J-Pole antennas and was hitting a repeater 20 miles away on 5 watts from inside my house.  That was pretty cool.  The J-Pole seemed to give out after time; I think the cat or the dog chewed on it.  So, after some research and study, I built a 2M 3-element yagi out of copper ground wire and scrap wood.  Now that gets into the repeater with room to spare.  I even had a nice QSO with Ken (25 miles away) on 2M simplex - on low power.

I started attending the Clay County ARES meetings to figure out how to help out if needed.  I met a couple great people there and I hope to keep involved.

But something was still missing.  FM repeaters are great, but I could tell that what I wanted to do was have a conversation with someone far away with nothing between us but alternating electrical and magnetic currents flung through the atmosphere.

So, I started looking at HF radios.  Some of the newer ones are really spiffy, but they're also kind of expensive.  Some of the older ones (from the 80s and 90s) are pretty solid with a wide range of features including built-in antenna tuners, support for computer interfaces, etc.  But, even those used radios seem to cost more than I wanted to spend to start out.

Earlier this year, three things happened at about the same time:  I started studying for the Extra Class test, I started learning Morse Code again, and I discovered Kenwood hybrid radios from the 70s: no antenna tuner, no computer interface - in fact, they have tube transmitter finals that need to be tuned before transmitting.  (I know, right?  But this is the way all radios were before solid state transmitters came along.)  And I realized something:  I had never taken the General test, where a lot of radio and propagation theory lives.

So, I made a decision:  I wanted to get into HF radio, but I wanted to get into it on the ground floor.  I want to understand why and how my radio works.  I want to manually get a feel for the HF bands using a radio that will help me with this.  I want to build my own antenna(s).

That's why I bought a TS-520.  I got a pretty decent deal on it, I think.  It didn't come with a microphone.  (By the way, an eBay lesson:  If you buy something on eBay, don't keep watching it for similar items - I saw another TS-520 sell 3 days later for the same price - with an antenna tuner and a microphone.  Sigh.)

The Interwebs have lots of great information on Kenwood hybrids - the great K4EAA Kenwood Hybrids site, a Yahoo Groups site, and lots more.  They're well-understood, and they can be worked on by mortals like myself.

I still talk on the 2M repeaters - usually to Ken and Keith.  You'll probably hear more about them in upcoming posts.

I intend to use this blog to chronicle my journey in HF radio.  The next couple posts will follow my ongoing testing of the rig (I have 14 days to return it if it doesn't work).  Let's see how this blogging thing sticks!

73 de Mike K9MJA