[Kenwood] Hooking Up a Transverter to a Kenwood TS-930s

[Ray Brown]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dana Luke" <dana@danaluke.com>
>
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I just bought a Ten-Tec model 1208 20m to 6m transverter unit which I will
> be using with my TS-930s.

  Congrats on trying to get on 6 meters. :-) I bought a 1209 kit about 5 years ago,
built it up and worked 6 from my 2m all-mode. Sold it earlier this year. (sob)

> The transverter as designed just plugs between
> the output of the rig and the antenna... and depends on the operator to be
> sure to cut back the rigs power to no more than 5 watts or so when
> transmitting.

  Well, no more than 15 watts... :-) But just be consistent, so that you drive
the circuitry okay. If you drop down to, oh, say, 1 or 2 watts output, then
your 6m output won't be as strong. There's a voltage divider in it, where
there are 4 220-ohm 2 W resistors in parallel to make 50 ohms at 8 W.
and the input for the inverter samples a small proportion of the input to
drive the rest of the inverter. I forget the exact proportion, but if you got
the book, you ought to see where it is.

> Well, I can see that at some point the operator just might forget to cut
> back the gain before calling CQ... and "puff" goes the transverter.

  If you're really concerned about this, there is a workaround... make sure
that you have a coax switch, but instead of hooking up the transverter
directly, run about 100' of RG-58 coax first. Try not to coil it up or it
will make all kinds of inductions, but the 100' becomes a not-so-slight
load between your HF rig and the transverter. You should drop at
least 30 W by doing this. Granted, it's not real efficient, but then you
don't have to worry about puffing the transverter. :-)

> Is there a better way to interface this unit to the 930?  If I recall, the
> 930 has an accessory jack with some low-level output for use with a
> transverter doesn't it?

  Don't know anything about the 930. The 820 has a transverter connection
but it's looking for milliwatts. You'd have to do some more digging in
the Ten-Tec book to see if you could access the direct input. Not sure
if you can get to it or not. Good luck!

                _Ray_        KB�STN
                VUCC (6m) # 1077 or so :-)