Coming over from the WK4DS page…
Hey everybody! Glad you are here and I look forward to writing my ramblings here now instead of over on my personal website. I have been writing blog posts for about 3 years now and they are starting to get noticed. I have a loyal following of readers that enjoy them and I am glad to share my adventures with all of you, both new and old!
Today I just want to say thank you and share a little about Christmas and what I have been doing in the shack.
You see, Roger (KG4WBI) and I are avid Ten Tec aficionados, (and to a lesser degree so is KV9L actually) and Roger has been gathering up older Ten Tec machines and building working radios out of them. He has quite the Ten Tec boneyard at this point actually…
Well, he gifted me two of these radios for Christmas this year!!! I am now the proud owner of a Ten Tec Argonaut 509 with matching power supply as well as a Ten Tec Argonaut II… Woohoo! (I already had the manual tuner in the above photo and it paired nicely with the Argonaut II so I left it in the photo) That is awesome in many respects and I am looking for space in the shack to set these machines up right now.
I still need to download and print the manual to the Argonaut 509 so I can figure out how to use it. This is old enough that it has controls that are not on modern radios that must be used to get the radio to work. Like the resonate knob and a special procedure to tune it up on the band to use it’s mighty 3 watts of power. That is why the power supply sitting on top of the radio is so small… lol. I think it is literally rated for 1 amp of output on the power supply.
These are like early childhood dream machines for many HAM operators and I am no different. The Argonaut II is a usual design radio with the way it works and how you use it. It has a digital display and even possesses a microprocessor controller inside to handle many functions of the radio. The display in these radios alone makes them incredibly valuable for nothing more than just the LCD display module. They are very fragile and do not ship well, so there are quite a few Argonaut II as well as Delta II radios that have damaged displays in them. These otherwise perfectly functional radios relegated to the storage shed due to not being able to see what is going on with the radio… Someone will figure out how to make an Arduino talk to the radio enough to show on a new display at some point, but not right now. LOL.
Well, as fate would have it. One of the Argonaut 2 radios that he bought “for parts only” turned out to work really well with only some sort of very minor repair. That is the radio you see above… I did have a couple of issues to resolve with it as it has been sitting for a while and the memory battery was dead so upon every power up, the frequency would reset to 15.000 mhz and the time reset to 12:00… another issue is that there was a dirty connection between two boards as the receive will just drop down to really low and if you peck on the side of the radio with your finger, it comes back… Dexoit to the rescue… I found that it was the connector on the RF Gain pot on the front panel that gave me back the receiver. The radio needs new display lighting, but that is a small issue that I will probably just live without for the time being so I can use the radio.
All that to say, I am looking forward to seeing everyone here and we have so much to look forward to in the future!
72
WK4DS ~David
PS: The usual Wednesday blog post will be here tomorrow so be on the lookout for it.
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