A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing the usual auction sites, and decided to see what IC-271A transceivers were going for these days, since mine is in pieces and I’m not sure I even have all of them anymore. I happened upon a unit going for a comparatively good price, reported at powering up, and no bids, so on impulse, I bid on it. Surprisingly enough, nobody else did, either. Anon, it arrived, and boy was I surprised….<\/p>\n
Turns out it’s in really clean condition, the RAM board has a good battery, the power out is good, and, when I got around to finally hooking it up to the antenna (and rewiring the connector in my Kenwood MC-80 desk mic) it got really good signal reports. And, even more surprisingly, I was delighted to find that it included the optional power supply unit powered by mains,\u00a0and<\/em> the optional preamp unit!<\/p>\n So, I got it on the air and I’ve been using it for the local 2-meter nets. And I got to thinking… I’ve always (literally always, since I found out about ham radio in middle school, but that’s another story…) always wanted to work satellites, and a 2-meter and 70-centimeter combo would work nicely for that. So I poked around the auction sites again, this time for an IC-471A, and managed to find one of those, too! It was not so clean (it needed a good scrubbing) and it didn’t have the fun options, but it does work, as well. I’ll need to adjust my antenna, as the radio is putting out less than expected power, and the antenna is also exhibiting SWR ripples, perhaps due to the 10-meter antenna mounted inches from it on the mast. Most likely I’ll be taking that down and replacing it with an inverted-V.<\/p>\n Next step is constructing a diplexer so I can connect both radios at once. Also, I’ve begun working on an Arduino interface to computer-control the radios. But again, that’s another post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A couple of weeks ago, I was browsing the usual auction sites, and decided to see what IC-271A transceivers were going for these days, since mine is in pieces and I’m not sure I even have all of them anymore. I happened upon a unit going for a comparatively good price, reported at powering up, […] →Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,15],"tags":[21,17,18,22,20,19],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boatanchors","category-vhf-uhf","tag-boatanchors","tag-ic-281","tag-ic-471","tag-transceivers","tag-uhf","tag-vhf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64,"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/64"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}