Fixing a Power Supply: With a Tube of Caulk?

Figure 1: The “caulk tube fix” can be seen behind the transformer.

My Trusty Ten Tec 260 power supply is a nice hefty one: – it’s capable of delivering 28 amps, and that’s enough to power any of my radios with ease.  Unfortunately, the supply developed the “old power supply” malady of producing slightly less-well-filtered DC current.  The first thought for me was that it was the electrolytic capacitors.  I checked the caps with my brand new ESR meter and a capacitor checker.  Oddly, the caps all seemed to check out OK.

Still, it seemed to me that the main filter capacitor was the culprit, because …

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Triton and Me: Back together Again

Figure 1: The Ten Tec 540 is playing love songs again

Four times I courted her.  Three times I dropped her.  This time it’s forever.  Over the years, I’d managed to find myself paired with the one whose songs were so delightful, whose voice stuck in my memory for the whole day long.

Impressionable and easily infatuated, my young mind learned of the CW siren, that seductress of the airwaves.  Long into the night, I listened to her soft messages, sometimes drifting off to sleep with my hand on the key, eventually slipping into one of those sweet dreams of hamdom.

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Shortwave Weather Faxes with the Ten Tec RX320D

Figure 1: RX320D, by Ten Tec, with “homemade” serial gender changer. Click to enlarge

So, I’d been trying to obtain weather faxes, of the type transmitted by the shortwave weather transmitters run by the US Coast Guard, and do that by using the little Soft66 Lite SDR board.  I’d added a preamp to that line-up in order to improve results, yet it seemed that improvement was needed still. So …

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