[Yaesu] Best $600 contest rig

[Glen Zook]

If you want CW and AM on 160 meters the Heath DX-100
and DX-100B transmitters and the RX-1 Mohawk both did
cover 160.  But, both date from the 1950s.

The SB-301 does have a noise blanker that works fairly
well on ignition type pulses and a little on power
line noise.  But, during any contest use of a noise
blanker is definitely going to cause a lot more
problems than it is going to cure.

Back in the 1970s I placed very well in all sorts of
contests including CW and SSB using the Heath "twins".
 I still have a set as well as using a Collins 75S-3A
and 32S-3 these days as my primary station.

I definitely agree that the Collins KWM-2 series is
VERY bad for CW (but works fine on SSB) since it uses
side-tone generation.  This usually produces at least
3 signals when used on CW.

Glen, K9STH


--- Steve Harrison <k0xp at dandy.net> wrote:

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.









Glen, K9STH

Website:  http://k9sth.com

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