At 11:03 PM 11/24/03 -0600, you wrote: >mch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > ac0y5 wrote: > > > Otherwise I must use what I can get at a price that I can afford. > > > > I don't know what you paid (perhaps nothing?), but you can buy a > > Motorola or GE for a couple hundred bucks down to next to nothing. > > If I were to consider my time, I would save more money spending a couple > > hundred bucks now. Yes, I would take a Spectrum. I could use the rack > > for mounting a controller or something. > >The spectrum RF gear does work EXCELLENT as a door stop!! > > > But the main problem I've had with Spectrum is that it can be 'right' > > when you put it on, but a few weeks later, the tuning changes on its own > > and it's no longer 'right'! > >I've also seen this with spectrum equipment. > > > I eagerly anticipate your views on Spectrum in a year. :-)) > >Yes, that will be interesting.
Let me tell you about a certain high-band Spectrum... Many years ago the W6TRW ham radio club at TRW in Los Angeles had a Spectrum that was factory ordered in the low end of the 145mhz range... Mind you this group had some high powered RF types as members.... guys that designed RF links for spy satellites... I worked there in the 1986-87-88 time frame.... For a feeling of the environment there read the book "The Falcon and the Snowman" sometime... it all happened there. The Spectrum SCR-1000 RX was quite sensitive once you got past the tendency to desense (use the best duplexer you can afford), and the TX was OK....except... We had it feeding a isolator, a pass cavity, a PD 6-can pass- reject duplexer, 30-40 feet of 7/8" feedline and a 22' Stationmaster. The equipment was installed in the utility room of the penthouse of a 12 story office building, with the antenna on a 10 foot tower section mounted to the roof of the adjacent elevator equipment room. There was one other radio there, a 60w GE Mastr-II UHF repeater used by the company rent-a-cops (the radio was complete with a 4-channel GE voter, with three aux receivers in outlying buildings - this was a 10-12 building campus spread across 4 city blocks). There is still to this day another 3 story government office building across the street that hosts a number of city, county, state and federal agencies and on the roof is a forest of antennas... Despite the skill of the RF engineers at TRW, and at least one, maybe two return trips to Spectrum, over a period of time the Spectrum caused the W6TRW folk to get to know the radio techs from the LAPD, the LAFD, the LA county radio shop, the FBI, the FAA (at LAX, a few miles away), the Navy, the Air Force, the Secret Service, and at least one alphabet soup agency that officially doesn't exist... (one of the customers for the spy satellites) all of which used the radio spectrum in the 136-150 or 160-172mhz range or "somewhere in the 225-420mhz range".... Each time the interference complaints stopped the day the Spectrum went off the air. Each time it was turned back on after being "fixed" it was clean for a while (anything from a week to 4 months) then a phone call arrived from a different agency... It was replaced with a factory built 136-150mhz 90w Mastr-II that was set up by WA6DPB's commercial 2-way shop. The day it went up on the building the temptation to drop the Spectrum off the side was there but the ham club would have had to pay for the cracked concrete 12 stories below. Aside from resetting the frequency about 6 months after it went up (after the crystals aged a little) the GE radio has needed zero attention in over 12 years. Please tune your new toy with a spectrum analyzer, then think three times about putting it on an antenna, and if you value your amateur license don't put it on a hill. Mike WA6ILQ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
