I haven’t been on the air much over the past week but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing ham radio activities.

I mentioned a week or so ago that I was experiencing noise on my Kenwood TS-2000 and I thought it was electrical or interference around my house. What seems to be the issue has to do with failed filters in the radio. It seems to be something a few TS-2000 owners have experienced, and even some other radio manufacturers are reporting the same thing, so it could be a bad batch made that is causing the problem. Anyway, it took a bit of diagnosing and researching to determine the likely cause – all a learning experience in troubleshooting RF issues. I engaged the help of K2ZB and K2ZO in my diagnosing/troubleshooting. I ordered the parts (under $20) and they will likely arrive this week. K2ZC has graciously agreed to do the desoldering/soldering to replace them, and K2ZO has loaned me his TS-2000 until mine is back up and running. I’ll report back on the details once there is more info.

Randy, K5ZD, who manages the CQ WPX contests, put out a message about more paper logs arriving for the 2011 WPX SSB contest so I volunteered and entered in 3 sets of logs. One log was from a US ham with a note on his cover sheet that said “Still contesting @ age 91“. You gotta love it!

Saturday morning a few folks from my local club met up at an ops house to assist with some troubleshooting of his Cushcraft R7000 vertical multi-band antenna. We fixed a few problems and replaced the coax, but a few problems remained and there didn’t seem to be an easy way to troubleshoot specific traps, so we put it up and he should be able to operate on what he has until he decides to order some parts, if available, or replace the antenna.

Edit: I forgot I helped out Fred @ QRZ.com clean up dead links on the page at http://www.qrz.com/i/commercial.html .

Tonight is our monthly club meeting and next weekend, if the weather is reasonable, we head up to  an old Nike site for a weekend of VHF contesting.

See you on the air!
K2DSL