[600MRG] 630 meter transverter

[Dave Riley]

Re: 630m transverter

Here is my first try at re-inventing the ham radio 630m wheel...
Gone are the days of aluminum chassis and Greenlee punches, etc., so 
from now on I take a piece of very good 'surplus' gear and replace the 
insides with something like this:

http://www.radiocom.net/600M/TxVerter2.jpg

which became this:
http://www.radiocom.net/600M/TxVerter3.jpg

I called it 'plug and play' and so far no squawks, but six years ago I 
lost my wife ( she went straight up ) and ham radio became fallow ground.

A few years ago I dusted out the cob webs and started all over...
1. Using the venerable Icom IC706 which went to sea for years and used 
with home brew 'transverters' on every band from 17.2 kcs. to 10 ghz...
     Recently I copied Q5 sigs ( pencil and paper ) from the remaining 
RF Alternator still on the air @ SAQ in Grimeton, Sweden...
     It's nice to have all the features of a rig like the 706 which you 
can also use literally from DC to light, in fact it even worked great on 
474 thz laser with NC1K QSO in Plymouth, Mass.
2. I had a cherry Ameco TX62 transmitter which was sacrificed first as a 
linear amp for the FM band ( only used the final tube ) and that more 
recently was changed to a high lever RF mixer between mixing the 10mhz. 
from a GPS clock sine wave and the Icom running ssb on 10.475 mhz 
yielding four watts to drive a converted Mitsubishi Stereo audio amp 
capable of several hundred watts on 630 meters...

It's still plug and play and lots of fun, stay tuned for latest iteration...
Now it starts with the IC706, a 20 db coax attenuator, bnc double 
balanced mixer, home brew 7 element low pass filter for 600m, all amp'd 
up to 1 watt and thence to a reworked Ramsey dual FET RFPA yielding an 
easy clean 20 watts out ( more on this later )...
Ham radio is alive and well and still great for building, re-learning, 
and collecting automatic QSOs nightly using WSPR..

Life is good, 73s from DaveR AA1A, KC4USX, KSBK, and WD2XSH/17

INT QSO 50.4 AM IMI K