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My_Home_Station.jpg

My_My Home Station (An Icom IC 718)

Hey! It would be an injustice if I don't acknowledge the great help received from OM Raj (Rajiv Kumar), VU2VTH, who repaired this rig long time back..Just after importing the rig, I damaged it's microphone circuitry by directly feeding a PSK31 signal from my computer soundblaster (the CW was still functioning). In fact I used an attenuator initially, but thought of removing it! I thought the attenuation was too much because I could not find a single trace of whisper with one small speaker at it's out! I opened the rig with the entire circuit diagram in front of me..tried to trace the fault along the entire microphone circuitry (highlighting the path in the circuit diagram with a yellow marker in a typical novice way!) but without any success. Then Raj, VU2VTH came to my shack with his high power specs on..I have seen a light of happiness in his eyes through those specs when he told me-"I got it!!". Then he asked me for a 1 microfarad capacitor which he thought was the culprit'.  I removed a small SMD type 1 microfarad capacitor from my old computer CD player (in fact I willfully damaged the faulty player to get my ICOM IC 718 repaired !! It was a month long nightmare for me to release the IC 718 from the Delhi customs!!). He carefully removed the SMD type capacitor from the ICOM board and replaced the capacitor. But alas.. still the SSB was not functioning! Just a moment of despair and then I saw the light again in his eyes! "Give me a low value 'resistor' now"..."10 ohms would do?" "Oh yeah give it to me! Then he bypassed the  'open circuit' through this small value resistor into the 'Ground'. And voila! The rig was back in action. He told me that it was an 'open circuit' in the 'Floating Ground Path'. Now that the path can float with this resistor below I became a 'SSB operator' again. Oh yeah! I am usually a 'CW operator'..I love and adore and a fan of CW..which was great fun for me when I operated CW (Of course I made one somewhat eratically functioning VU2VWN TX too in 1989 and mostly busy sending AM signals to a distance of 150 km to VU2RCH).

Thanks to my inner 'radio sense'! I must be having a strong 'radio sense' man! I found the confidence in him and he proved it!

Thank you Raj for the wonderful help.

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