[Yaesu] Best $600 contest rig

[Steve Harrison]

At 11:34 AM 9/24/2006 -0700, Jack/NA7RF wrote:
>There *are* some surprisingly bad rigs out there like.....
>.....the FT-301S/D, among others!

That's surprising, to me. I had one of the first 301S's in the States (in
fact, it was bought in Japan by an airline pilot friend and brought back
here, just for me) and thought it was just as good or better than my
modified SB300 in terms of intermod and overload. And I lived within
eyesight of W6AM's rhombic farm. When he was on the air, he would
noticeably reduce sensitivity of my SB300 but didn't affect my FT301S at
all. The only real problem I recall with my 301S was its noise blanker
didn't handle my line noise very well, especially with big signals on the
band. The limiter in the SB300 usually did better in that regard. There was
no doubt that the sensitivity of the 301S was superior to that of my SB300
on 15 and 10, too. That's no surprise, though. Again, the SB300 was highly
modified; I used a high-mu tube in the front end which really improved
15/10m sensitivity, and eventually replaced the mixer stage with a
double-balanced mixer and FET amplifiers. The AGC system was extensively
reworked, too. But the 300 had noticeable leakage around the crystal IF
filters. IIRC, that was also supposed to have been a problem on the 301S
(and, later, I heard on the TS120S, too) but if there was, I never noticed
it on the 301S. On the 120S, the leakage was resolved by rerouting some
wires that ran over stages on each side of the IF filter.

>INRAD lists filters for the ICOM rigs mentioned above but not for the
Omni-D. 
>Unfortunately one can spend as much in filters as the rig is worth but the 
>improvement in performance can be surprisingly significant.

I tried several Icom radios during field day ops and never liked them at
all. Those experiences forever poisoned me against Icom until I got my
IC211 2m radio. I still don't like Icom's HF radios, though. One thing that
really hurt my perception of Icom radios during the early '80s was that it
seemed that every one of them at a FD site that I was at, would generate
wideband noise on transmit. It was very frustrating trying to persuade the
SSB guys that their brand-new nearly-kilobuck Icoms were killing my CW ops
on the same band ;o\  ;o\  ;o\  Several times, I would later find out that
my 120S was causing their Icom receivers to blank
;o))))))))))))))))))))))))  I knew it wasn't a technical problem with the
120S since W6GGV and I used to operate SSB and CW on the same bands from
his QTH with no co-interference problems.

>All that being said, there may be other factors that come into play in a
>contest environment, like CW keying quality at 40wpm or sidetone levels,
>like Steve mentioned, or the availability of of bells and whistles like
>IF bandpass tuning or IF shift.

The IF bandpass tuning, and IF shift, of the FT301S was something that I
fell in love with during my first CW contest. At the time, I was a member
of the Southern California Net, Region Net 6 and had several TCC skeds; so
nightly performance of my radios was important, especially in the presence
of nearby QRM. We were on 3600 in the '60s and early '70s and thus during
our late net, competing with the Kentucky State Net on the same frequency.
Due to my 80m antlers' low radiation angle, I often had problems hearing
others in the SoCal area vice the folks in Kentucky; thus, I would have to
use the narrowest filters I could during traffic nets. Those two IF tuning
features of my new 301S made all the difference in the world compared to my
old SB300. During contests on 80 and 40m, I could now hear the weak
Europeans and SW Asians that all the east coasters were working whereas
before with the SB300, they just weren't audible, much less copiable.

I'd love to have another FT301, either S or plain-jane or D. They were
large, heavy radios, though, but really easy to work on with their plug-in
modules.

Steve, K0XP