Last piece of my Kenwood TS-850-line has arrived! The Kenwood SP-31 speaker. I already had the chance to play with one when the TS-870 for the club was temporarely in my shack. A beautiful speaker, not only to look at, but also the filters do a fantastic job. And most important: my TS-850-line is complete now! I’ve got the TS-850 transceiver, the PS-52 power supply, the SP-31 speaker and the MC-60 microphone!

I always wanted to build a piece of wooden furniture for this Kenwood line. Something that I could put on my desk so the gear is not placed directly on the desk but a little higher. Better view on the display, easier to operate and safer in case if anything wet (drinks) falls on the desk. It should be something fancy like mahogany or so. Nice shiny and chic! Mahogany is too expensive at this time, but I will make something more suitable.

Some time ago I’ve bought the TCXO-SO-2 option (Temperature Compensated X-tal Oscillator) from Joerg, DL6IB. Although I was very pleased to have the option, I postponed the installing because I wanted to figure out a way to measure the stability improvement before and after installing. Since I don’t own (yet) a frequency counter, I didn’t know a way to check.
A few days ago Joerg again send me a message asking me if I already installed the option in my Kenwood TS-850. I was a little ashamed to reply I didn’t. Promised him and myself to do this as quickly as possible. At this new years day I’m a little tired anyway, didn’t feel like anymore work around the house. So I sat down and opened my TS-850. Before I started with installing, I googled around to find a story of installing this option. Didn’t find anything. Okay, it is a pretty simple install but it gives me confidences to read about it. Seems I have to post the first story about installing this option… (more…)

Last Tokio Ham Fair, 22 and 23 august 2009 Kenwood was presenting a new transceiver at their stand. It looks like a refurbished TS-570 but insiders explain that it is a new high-end rig. More like a K3. Very interesting! It will be introduced in 2010.

Here I found a short clip of the introduction.

My main HF rig is still the good old Kenwood TS-450SAT. I absolutely love this rig! It looks beautiful, it sounds beautiful and it works great.
The most funny about this rig is, everyone who owned one in the past and see it again on my desk, sighs and says: “I should never never never sold that baby!” Even guys who own a Icom 756 pro III nowadays like the looks of my 450 more.

I’m a quick learner, I never want to sell this piece of equipment too. So I figured, if I never wanted to sell it, I might as well start the hunt for all the available options for it. If I’m gonna enjoy the rig, then please with all its options in it!
So I opened the manual to see what kind of options there are. Actually there a a few of them! Let me publish a little list:

Filters:

- YG-455C-1 CW filter 500 Hz
- YG-455CN-1 CW filter 250 Hz
- YG-455S-1 SSB filter 2,4 KHz
- YG-88C-1 CW filter 500 Hz
- YG-88CN-1 CW filter 270 Hz
- YG-88S-1 SSB filter 2,4 KHz
- YG-88SN-1 SSB filter 1,7 KHz

Other options:

- SO2-TCXO crystal oscillator oven
- VS-2 voice synthesizer (reads frequency)
- TU-8 Tone unit (so you can use tone enabled repeaters on 10m)
- DSP-100 MF digital signal processor.

I opened the hunt for all of these options. I was able to find the YG-455C-1 500 Hz CW filter, the YG-88SN-1 SSB 1,7 KHz filter and the VS-2 voice synthesizer. The only filter I don’t understand is the 2,4KHz SSB filter at 455 KHz MF. There is already standard a 2,4 KHz filter in this rig for 455 KHz. So I’m still looking for the other filters, the SO2-TCXO, the TU-8 and the DSP-100. Would be great to complete the rig!