Along with some of the other posters, I was running an XV-144 2 meter
transverter for the contest on the weekend. Mine was running with my
5000a, Windows XP SP3, PowerSDR 2.0.16. It ran pretty well, but I had
a couple of issues.
The first was that I don't seem to be getting full output out of the
flex to drive the transverter. I'm using the split cables on the IF
connections, separate transmit and receive. The output was low, but
usable for the contest. I wasn't able to fully drive the amplifier and
get as much output as I was planning. I checked all the settings and
eventually dragged out a spectrum analyzer to see just how much signal
was coming out of the transverter port. My understanding is that the
nominal power on this port is 1mw=0dbm, with the capability to drive
it 3db higher than that with everything set to max. The best I was
able to get was -2dbm. That was the max with either voice peaks in
USB, or with CW. That was with the drive set to 100 and the XVTR power
setting on the XVTR setup page to 100. Is there another adjustment
someplace that I am missing? What do I do to get the output up to
where it belongs?
The other issue was that the power setting on the XVTR setup page kept
changing. I noticed that if I changed to FM-N mode to listen to a
repeater, that the drive on the main window stayed all the way to the
right of the slider, but the level was now 40 instead of 100. That is
probably normal behavior to derate the PA for a 100 percent duty cycle
transmission, but I noticed after returning to USB that my power
output was even lower. Checking the XVTR setup page would show that
despite the drive control now showing 100 (and me sliding the slider
all the way to the right again after returning from FM) that the power
setting in the setup page would now be 40. It didn't seem to happen
every time, but it happened more often than not. Occasionally it would
randomly change to some other number, like 68. Is this normal behavior?
And finally a question on band limits. I thought I had read that while
the flex limits transmissions out of band on the normal output, that
band checking was suspended on the transverter port to facilitate
coverage of the larger VHF and UHF bands. Although I'm not sure how
well my particular transverter would handle transmissions in the
upper 2 mhz of the band (it hears reasonably well) but I tried a
couple of test transmissions up there and didn't seem to have any
output from the flex, although I don't recall seeing any lockout
message like I do on the lower bands. Will the flex transmit from
28-32mhz on the transverter port?
I loved being able to see the activity on the bands with the
panadapter. It definitely helped me work more stations that I probably
would have missed if I'd just been randomly tuning back and forth. Got
good reports on the flex-transverter combination also.
Thanks
Kevin, WB2EMS
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