Having decided to join the melee trying to work 3Y0X on Peter One Island, I dusted off my FT1000MP. The only time that I use it are on occasions such as this when a separate receiver is useful when working split.
I noticed that the receive sensitivity was varying on 20 & 40m, and traced this to the HPF board at the front of the receiver. This board contains 8 miniature relays which do the filter switching. If I tapped the board the received signal strength varied. From notes I found on the web this is a known problem where the solution is to change all 8 relays. I didn't fancy changing these small relays if there was a better solution. I remembered that the FT102 had big problems with people were changing relays by the bucket full. Yaesu don't seemed to have learned the lesson of the FT102 ! A local amateur came up with a fix which consisted of running a small DC current through the contacts to break down any oxide layer that had formed over time. This morning I modified the HPF board to run about 1mA through the contacts. 10 resistors and 2 caps later - End of problem - Fixed.... The big relays in the KAT100 should not have a problem, but what about the smaller ones in the K2, KAT2 ? As far a I can tell a number of these have only very small AC signals passing through them. None have any DC current flow. It took about 7 years before the problem surfaced with my FT1000MP, I would be interested in comments on whether in the same time scale I might expect to get similar problems with my Elecraft gear. 73 Stewart G3RXQ _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: [email protected] You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
