OK, I finally got around to it. The description of this hamfest special.

For those not familiar with this radio I'll give a brief rundown with the "stock" features, then the upgrades I performed on it:

Synthesized 2m FM transceiver with frequency coverage from 144.000 to 147.995. Simplex or repeater operation (repeater split is crystal controlled, +/- 600 kc standard, 2 available slots for adding your own offsets... the crystals are (as I recall) HC-49 sized, with the split being the difference between the crystal and 16.9 Mc). To change channels, you move knobs.. a lot of knobs. One knob to select Mc (144,5,6,7). One to select hundred Kc, one to select tens Kc. There's a button to add 5 Kc to the frequency (so you can tune to the 146.685 repeater). The knobs, of course, change your receiver frequency... to retune the transmitter, select the proper button position (simplex/repeat), and move... another knob... to select +600 or -600, or "A" or "B" for the crystal splits that you've installed.

Hamfest Special Condition: Dead audio amplifier that a previous owner had replaced with an LM386 (this means that instead of a pleasant 2-4W of audio, there's about .3W of audio. This made it darn hard to hear, and impossible to "mobile" with... the truck was just too loud to hear it, even with an earphone.). Dead S-Meter (NO DEFLECTION!). As I recall, there was a stench of nicotine coating most of the innards. And of course, somewhere along the line, a previous owner had installed a Com-Spec ME-3 tone encoder. I couldn't find any reeds for it, so I couldn't really hit the local repeaters as the tone board was "crystalled" for 1Z (110.9, I believe), and the local repeaters are 123.0 (3Z).

Prettied up: The first thing to do with any new toy is rip it apart and see if you can break it. Sure enough, I could. I started wiggling things around, and boy did people say that I had loused it up. I then put it back like it was, and it was mostly back like it was, except that the S-Meter moved now. Not calibrated, but who cares - it's nice to see the thing wiggle when you hit the button or hear noise in the speaker.

Matt, N3IVK, donated a newer vintage (Synthesized! DIP SWITCH CONTROLLED!) Com-Spec tone encoder from his junk box, which got installed after about 2 months of radio ownership (oddly, it was about 2 days after he fixed the tone squelch decoder on my usual repeater, thus meaning I couldn't access it from "base", that I ended up installing the tone encoder that he had given me. Coincidence is a strange animal...). Matt is a local radio mechanic and a swell guy.

Shortly after installing the tone encoder (or maybe it was slightly before... they say that something or other is the first thing to go as we get older...), I got ambitious and put in an MCW board and a jack for a key on the back. No, I won't give you the schematic - build your own. I can say that it's less than 6 transistors, 3 diodes, and maybe a whole 5-6 capacitors and a small handfull of resistors. And, I'll say that it's a simple R-C Phase Shift Oscillator (2 transistor - 1 to oscillate, 1 to buffer). The buffer stage is keyed (on) when a PNP transistor is grounded. The diodes are used so that the 1 key can pull both the PTT and the MCW low, without the MCW going on everytime the mike is keyed. Now, go be a ham and build one. I pulled the stock speaker out and replaced it with a higher sensitivity unit that was about an inch smaller ... used the extra space to mount the MCW board in.

I did end up needing to build a mixer so that I could simultaneously use the MCW and tone encoder boards. This is simple, something like 2 resistors and some capacitors. Basically, without it, I had to turn the tone board level WAY up to open squelch when the MCW was keyed, so high that it was audible when on the microphone... not cool. This provided an added stage of isolation.

I have since ripped out the com-spec tone board to stick it in a newer, nicer radio (Kenwood TR-9130) and shoehorned in a Ramsey TD-1 (modified-heavily). I should remember from now on to stock a whole lot of micro trimpots rather than the big 3/4" trimpots I usually keep around (hey, it WORKS, it's just BIG). If you're going to use a TD-1 for CTCSS, use a 1uF cap. I ended up sticking in 2 .22uF's and the stock .1uF in parallel to just barely bring the frequency down to 115 at the low end.

What I'm doing to it next: Replacing the LM386 with an LM380 and giving/ selling it to a nice young ham who needs it.

So: I spent around $25 at the hamfest for a radio that originally sold for $359.95 (check an old 73 Magazine - 1976 vintage - I think you can probably find a nice, full page add for this synthesized marvel with no memories, and no provision for "crystal" channels), and probably spent another $65 fussing on it to make it nice and somewhat useable (oh - don't use Cobra High Gear mikes for 2m gear - nothing but lousy audio reports. They may be "ok" for use on radios where people routinely over-crank the mike gain, and have lots of interference - people said the intelligibility was fine, it just sounded "awful" - not what FM should be (but it might be OK for SSB). My fault for buying a $13 mike on clearance from a farm supply dealer).