> On Wednesday 26 April 2006 7:54 am, Larry Loen wrote: >> 2. Receive antennas on HF (currently inhibiting my progress on 30 >> meters and preventing me from deploying beverages on 80). Manual >> switching between transmit and receive antennas won't work in even the >> slightest pileup. >> >> 3. Hooking up a variety of HF amplifiers that (as we learned in Belize) >> will overload and burn out the amplifier relay circuit of the SDR. > > Forgive my ignorance, as I don't even have my SDR-1000 yet, but am I to > gather > that the rig does not have any "keying" voltage for a 12v Dow relay or > similar? I had planned to use a beverage on 160 and 75 for receive, and > just > assumed I could use my Dow key relay for switching antenna's between xmit > and > recv. Maybe I missread the manual, but I thought I saw a provision for > this. > > Thanks, > Brian >
It indeed does have a keying voltage, and the manual tells all about it, but like several other modern rigs, it apparently does not have enough current capacity to deal with the requirements of all amplifiers. Buffering is sometimes needed. I'm not familiar with your "dow key" but it might do the job for t/r antenna switching. Check the current requirements, though. Main point is, there's no separate input for receive antennas as is now commonplace, though hardly universal, on many a rig. Nor is there an "off the shelf" solution from Flex. Everyone who has these needs is on their own. In terms of the amp, in Belize, we were dealing with a solid state amp (still on sale, so it isn't always about older amps) and that amp overloaded the circuit. Not fatal, the SDR was repairable, but it took that particular rig out of action for the contest and we had to run sans amplifier. I have since discovered that some other modern rigs share this problem. The SDR is a fabulous rig (if you've read my various adventures, you can see what I've done with it, at least), but there are a few deficiencies. This is one of them, IMHO. Larry WO0Z
