Gareth, Your statement about the receive sensitivity caught my eye. I have to wonder: Was the front end of your repeater's receiver ever aligned for optimum sensitivity on your RX channel? Of the several TKR-750 repeaters I have worked on over the years, only one of them was properly adjusted to optimize the receiver, even though the dealers programmed them before delivery! The instruction manual that is shipped with the repeater makes no mention of this requirement.
The fine print under System Setup on page 2 of the service manual states: "The RX RF BPF (L2, L3, L5, L6, L7 on TX-RX unit A/2) must be aligned to obtain the maximum sensitivity at a programmed frequency." Even though the TKR-750 is a low-tier repeater intended for non-demanding applications, it does have helical resonators in the front end. When properly tuned, it should at least match and may out-perform the Vertex VXR-9000 in both sensitivity and IM rejection. 73, Eric Lemmon WB6FLY -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gareth Bennett Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2007 4:09 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Repeater-Builder] TKR-750 P/A Failures Hi Group, Can anybody out there enlighten me on the power amp failures on the earlier Kenwood TKR-750 Repeaters? I recall that Kenwood was scrambling around changing these under warranty when the 750 was first released. I have just removed one from service that was only pushing 15 Watts @ 7 Amps (Set for High power). This particular repeater has already suffered dry joints around the PA stage which was not the cause of fault this time. Can any Kenwood dealers shed some light on this common problem and suggest the replacement P/A part number for around 150-160 MHz? Interestingly we replaced the -750 with a Vertex VXR-9000 repeater and commissioning tests revealed about 3 dB better sensitivity than the 750's for 12dB Sinad. Regards _________________________________________________________________ Gareth Bennett
