Old Gear.

I was working on my Yeasu FT-707 (yes, 707!) it's not even one of the famous 101's which I remember so well. Anyway as I was struggling with it, I complained to my wife that it seemed that all my equipment was getting old. She laughed and pointed out that it was old when we met (we've been married 12 years!) .

I suppose she is right, the Heathkit SB104 I built in 1980, right after I got out of the navy and I acquired the Yaesu in 1992, it was old then. Still, my HK does not seem like a 30+ yea old radio, it has been solid. I have needed to clean the switch contacts and a bit of care for the potentiometers and it keeps humming along. I suppose that someday I will get a radio which is not middle-aged. The HW7 and HW-8 are about as old as the SB104. ,but I did not build those, so although they are fun, they're more of the order of stuff I wanted when I was younger.
2 meters around here is almost dead compared to Southern California, I miss the QSOs I used to listen in on and take part in. I am sure that is part of the difference in living in a 600,000 population vs 10 million. It's OK, I'll take the smaller crowds. But my old Kenwood TM201 is more than I need and stays off most of the time. I did have fun building a tone board for it.
Anyway, as so many have already said elsewhere, older rigs are easier to work on. The Yeasu is probably about as complicated as I really want to work on. . . although you do what you have to do when it comes to staying on the air.

Has it really been so long since my last post? Yea it has!
Seems that like so many others, I have not had a lot of new things to add here. My palm tree vertical still working OK. I would like to add some matching tuning to the base, but I am too cheep to buy a remote or auto-tuner to do the job right. SO perhaps an UNUN? Some say a 9:1 or 4:1 would be right and would help decrease my feed-line loss (50 feet of low loss coax.)  The problem is that it now works well enough on 40, 10 and 20  meters for the occasional QSO and in general I seem to have 10 minutes here and there to listen and less time to actually operate. As my (now 4 years old) gets older, In some ways the workload goes down, but in others it goes up!.
No progress on my smd bitx20, but I did get my workbench cleaned up. . . . I can do two sided pc boards fairly well now, although I do not try to register anything smaller than about .2 inches, so through the pins dips routing is out. However, it does replace a lot of wire jumpers on my boards.
The HMO police still are not on to me. I am planning a flagpole and Martin house to be up this spring . .. that should help my signal a bit.