My Radio Gear / Equipment

I am by no means a rich person and I certainly dont have a shack that can boast several towers rigs antennas and amplifiers. However any person can save up enough for a half decent radio and work from there, and what they have to work with. Below is my equipment; small as it is it allows me to get on the air on 160, 80, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12, 10, 2 meters as well as 440 (70cm)

The heart of the system is my pride and joy, the FT-857D. This is my second HF radio, my first was a FT-101E. It was cheap and got me on the air, unfortunatly if your not used to tube rigs then trying to operate one can be difficult. I sold that and saved up enough to buy this one. Beautiful radio!!. I do a lot of portable operations as well. I have modified a briefcase to house the radio, automatic tuner, power supply, straight key, and a 20m dipole. A bit heavy but very portable. You can download the manual and technical manual if you like, as I find the pdf files much better to look at than paper.

Powering the FT-857D is a SEC-1223 20amp power supply. This is a switching power supply and so far has given me no troubles. Very compact and easy to travel with. I also use a 10 amp version of this power supply when operating portable from a generator. I would hate for anything to happen to this one so I keep it home nice comfortable and dry.

I use the LDG AT-100Pro to tune my G5RV antenna, it tunes it good from 80-10. I know its not as good as a dipole for each band but when you are only renting a basement apartment you have to make due with what you can. One of the beautys of this tuner is that you can manually tune as well as automatically tune. Another bonus is it used latching relays so once its tuned you can take the power away from it and it will stay in that tuned position. While operating portable I have a 8AA cell pack from radio shack hooked up to it, that provides 12v power for well over 2 days of operations. Perfect little tuner for at home and away. I have also made up a cable to have a one button tune for the ft-857d, hold down the tune button and the radio tx's the tuner tunes then the radio is put in rx mode and the tuner goes to sleep. The how to for doing the cable is available in the ham radio section of the site. You can download the manual

I use the MFJ-941D manual tuner as a back up mostly, the ldg automatic is much quicker but if you got the time this will tune anything you can throw at it. You can download the manual if you want to.

Starting in 2006 I got a chance to work digital modes and do rtty psk sstv and more and got hooked. I use the west mountain rigblaster plug n play to connect the ft-857d to the laptop. It works seemlessly I can run the cables in less than the time it takes to boot the laptop

Needed a new bicycle mobile / portable and didnt want to spend 500.00 on something that might fall and crack open on a trail so I hoped on deal extreme and got this nifty lil thing. Manual and how to get extra freq's to TX on are available elsewhere on this site.