Man-packs (Portable radios):
I’m always on the look out for army/
police radio surplus and have repaired and used the following equipment:
-
Redifone GR345 – 2 to 13 MHz CW, USB and AM, Xtal switching solid-state, 1.75MHz IF single conversion transceiver.
I purchased this rig from the Delhi Junk market back in 1993, repaired and managed to modify it for LSB by changing the carrier generator Xtal (not the filter), removed the 'push to tune' facility in the final tuning shaft mechanism as this was good only when the radio was vertically mounted/ operated. On my shack table, it moved all over the place while tuning the finals !
I did not find the built in tuning/ swr indicator very effective. Lastly, despite having a wonderful, high quality Xtal mixing (synthesizer) bank, I found it very cumbersome to scan the band because of its 1KHz spacing. The 40 Mtr band in India is from 7 to 7.1 MHz and tuning just the 100 KHz section up and down a couple of times was enough for me to make the difficult decision of giving it away to another HAM.
-
GE524 – 2 to 30 MHz CW,LSB,USB and AM TRX.
This transceiver, manufactured in the '70s by Bharat Electronics, Bangalore, was originally built for fixed frequency channel operation using plug-in Xtals but the best part of this rig is that it has an input for external VFO, which is my main interest.
The TRX chain uses 2 IF stages and the Side Band filter is a Collins 455KHz Mechanical Filter.
I just love this rig and have worked many DX.
Initially I used a simple Colpitts VFO for single band (40Mtrs) but at present I have built a DDS using AD9850/ AD9851 and am able to cover all the HF bands.
Home