At 08:44 AM 10/5/2009, Brian Lloyd wrote:
your typical amateur will never have seen
a Flex 3000 or any other SDR before. He/she is probably stepping up
from something like an Icom IC-718 or it will be his/her first radio.
I beg your pardon.... My first radio was an IC-718 and in four
years I worked 225 countries.
My second radio was an F3K, and I did have some troubles with it, but
most were of my own
making. I got lots of help from the list. I learned quite a few
things, among them:
1. The weakest link in the F3K is the mic input. If you run SSB
(or AM), and you don't use a
mic with a shielded cable (or maybe even if you do), and you are
close to your antenna, watch
out for RFI. I solved mine with half a dozen well-placed
ferrites. But an unbalanced mic input
on the front panel would be a great upgrade.
2. If you use an amp, you can have LOTS of RFI. See point 1.
3. If you have a solid-state amp it is very sensitive to reflected
power, so make sure your
antenna has a very low SWR.
4. RFI can strike anywhere, all interconnections should have a
ferrite at each end.
5. Good RFI grounding can help a lot.
I knew a week in I would love the F3K once I got it working
well. And now it is working pretty
well, the only remaining problem is an SWR that is a little high on
40m. I am going to work with
the antenna manufacturer on that. I now have five new countries on my F3K.
--
Dave Gomberg, San Francisco NE5EE gomberg1 at wcf dot com
All addresses, phones, etc. at http://www.wcf.com/ham/info.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
FlexRadio Systems Mailing List
FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz
http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz
Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/
Knowledge Base: http://kc.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
