Fall 2005 Issue

All you need to know but were afraid to ask . . .

 By Rich Arland,* K7SZ

Hi again and welcome back to VHF+ on a shoestring budget. If you have read the first two installments of this column, you’ll undoubtedly have formed an opinion about yours truly—either I am crazier than an outhouse rat or I have a special affinity for older VHF gear that can be pressed into service at a fraction of the cost of buying new gear, or I am cheap and don’t like to spend money and I enjoy doing more with less. Well, you are undoubtedly right on at least two of the three counts. I’ll leave it to your imagination as to which two!

So far we have taken a critical look at what we want to do at VHF+ and have constructed a plan to bring our thinking into focus and procure some gear. Now if you are like me, you’ll have been scouring e-Bay, local ham radio flea markets, and the various lists on the internet in search of gear. Just because I chose to use the 25-year-old ICOM “bookcase” radios doesn’t mean you have to go that route. Yaesu, ICOM, and Kenwood all had economy-class as well as high-end VHF+ rigs aplenty in the mid 1970s through the late 1980s. Many of these radios will work quite well in your quest to get some RF gear on the high bands that can be procured at reasonable cost. Several of my non-ICOM favorites are the Kenwood TS-700A and the Yaesu FT-221R (both 2-meter multi-mode rigs) and prices are very reasonable. While they don’t have all the bells and whistles of the newer multi-mode VHF+ radios, these two units are still good prime movers.

A quick look through older issues of CQ, QST, Ham Radio Magazine, and 73 Magazine should yield ads and product reviews on most of this older gear. As a matter of fact, a few years back the ARRL published a set of books (The ARRL Radio Buyer’s Source Book, Vols. 1 & 2) that were a compilation of QST product reviews that took in everything from HF radios to VHF/UHF rigs, accessories, and antenna rotors. Therefore, if you are really into doing some research, hit the ham radio fleamarkets and locate copies of these out-of-print books and use them for reference. Look around, do your homework, and spend your hard-earned money wisely. After all, that’s the point of this entire series on VHF+ on a shoestring.


 

A new DK9SQ 4-element, dual-band (2 meters and 70 cm) log periodic array designed for portable/rover use. This neat antenna collapses into a very small package for transport.

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