[Yaesu] Best $600 contest rig

[Steve Harrison]

At 05:17 PM 9/20/2006 -0700, Glen Zook wrote:
>Although "boat anchors", the Heath SB-101 for
>transceiver and the "twins" (SB-401 transmitter and
>the SB-301 receiver) are even better.  They cover the
>main contest bands (80, 40, 20, 15, and 10 meters) and
>the "twins" can operate in transceive mode for SSB and
>"split" for CW and SSB DX on 80 and 40 meters.
>
>The tube type receiver is, for all practical purposes,
>immune from overload and the transmitter is MUCH
>cleaner in terms of things like broad band noise than
>any solid-state equipment.

I'll go along with that, although allow me to point out that they don't
cover 160m (for some additional mults when working multiband/single op),
nor does any Heath equipment (other than possibly the SB104, with which I'm
not familiar) reject many types of line noise very well. Then agin, if yer
having to use a noise limiter or blanker during a contest, you're almost
certainly going to suffer reduced receiver performance in the first place
unless it's an add-on that samples noise far out of band like Collins had
for the KWM-2 (which sampled around 42 MHz IIRC and was one of the world's
worst CW transceivers, IMO). But if you're talking about the typical
city-type ham QTH, you'll almost certainly need that noise blanker at some
time. As for 160m: some can use it, some don't have the room for any kind
of effective antler. The added mults can be very helpful.

My extensive experience is limited to the SB300, FT301 or a TS120S, all of
which always did fine for me on CW contesting. I had a FT757GX but it did
suffer overload on occasion and the noise blanker, while very effective on
a quiet band, was worthless during a contest. I don't do voice on any band
unless someone's holding sharp objects to my body  ;o\  ;o\  ;o\

Steve, K0XP