Hello Paul, You've peaked my curiosity about the Yaesu FT-102. Several years ago a close friend of mine gave me an FT-102 station. Wally was going into an assisted home and no room for radios. I don't believe he ever used it on AM but it does have the AM/FM module installed. I personally have never used it. Just put it on the shelf as a memory from him. (He's now SK) Hmmmmm .... maybe I should get it down and find the mods that relate to AM. I took a quick look at your web site thinking you might have some reference to that but didn't see anything. Also did the usual web search using different search engines. That was sort of interesting .... Hi. Got over a thousand references to FT-102 including several *Zoom* sites. Hmmmmm .... FT-102 was used in *Zoom* movies ???? Hehehe .... ya gotta love the garbage on the Internet. Anyway if you have any personal info on AM mods for the FT-102 I'd appreciate it. If nothing else I'll archive it and put it with the radio for a possible later project. AM is all I'm really interested in these days and most of the time I don't consider the ham solid state/hybrid gear that interesting but maybe I need to readjust my attitude .... Hi. *By the way I had to resend this message with the word Zoom cause using (starts with a p ends with an n second letter is an o and third is an r .... Hi) caused the filters to take this as spam*. Hehehe .... interesting filtering. Thanks Skip WB4GMQ -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of VJB Sent: Monday, October 03, 2005 07:43 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [AMRadio] Equipment discussion -- AM "value"
Hi Jose, Welcome to AM ! At least that's what I get from your questions. To establish "value" for an AM rig you have to set some priorities. If you also plan to use the equipment on SSB you may limit yourself somewhat because of likely technical compromises. Broadly stated, most contemporary transceivers presume the user will be using SSB, so the audio quality on transmit and receive will typically suffer on AM. That's because manufactuers traditionally shortchange audio quality for SSB. For those of us who use only AM, such rigs have little value. There are exceptions, including the Yaesu FT-102 which can be dressed up with some audio modifications to sound like this: http://www.wa3vjb.com/sound/HUZ-FT102%20(2).mp3 The older Yaesu FT-101E can also be made to sound very good, and the purchase price for used gear like this is less than $400. Here's Frank's example of the transceiver: http://www.wa3vjb.com/sound/WY3D-Demo.mp3 On receive, the Ten-Tec RX 340 uses synchronous detection and low-distortion audio circuitry to recover audio that sounds like this: http://www.wa3vjb.com/sound/DefinitiveVJB.mp3 I have to point out that the economic value is different than the practical operating value. The Yaesu FT1000MP sounds very, very good when transmitting AM with a good quality microphone. Yet, why pay for all the other stuff on there that a user oriented toward AM would never utilize? For the person who specializes iN AM, the same or far less money could be spent on a rig designed with AM as its emphasis. If you're planning vintage gear (and this is the sort of equipment that emphasizes AM) you'll need to sort out whether you can settle for audio that sounds like the space shuttle, or whether you want audio that's human-sounding: warm and high quality. In this equation, establishing "value" is up to you rather than recommendations from out here. You'll know what you want. Best of luck, and feel free when you decide among some candidates to run them by the opionion gallery here. Paul/VJB Annapolis -----
