SBE Console II With PAL VFO

[cadillaccharlie]

Hi all! Just acquired a SBE Console II SSB that is expanded to 40 channels. I love this rig and it does the job on AM & SSB. My question is that the power output drops from 5+ watts to 1-watt dead key progressively as you step up to channel 40. As this is the first time, I am using a VFO, is this normal or do I need to adjust something. Thanks in advance for any help.

Dave

[Sandbagger]

May 12, 2022 16:47:34 GMT -5 cadillaccharlie said:

Hi all! Just acquired a SBE Console II SSB that is expanded to 40 channels. I love this rig and it does the job on AM & SSB. My question is that the power output drops from 5+ watts to 1-watt dead key progressively as you step up to channel 40. As this is the first time, I am using a VFO, is this normal or do I need to adjust something. Thanks in advance for any help.

Dave

Older 23 channel radios do not have as broad a bandwidth as newer 40 channel radios do. You can stagger tune the radio to broaden the response, but you risk lowering the overall power output across the whole band. Alternately, you can tune in a way that favors the upper channels so that you can get best performance on the upper SSB channels. The only issue there is that you may start losing power on the lowest channels.

[cadillaccharlie]

Thanks Sandbagger!  I understand what you're saying. Since this is the first time that I have owned and used an external vfo on an older 11-meter rig, my question would be do I tune the Console II or is there a tuning adjustment on the vfo itself?

Charlie

[2600]

This is beginning to sound like "My car has a rough idle. What adjustment do I turn to smooth it back out?"

Quick answer is that it's probably not that simple.

Same goes for this symptom. If the radio is stronger on a crystal than the VFO for the same channel, this points to the VFO setup not being quite right. It has alignment adjustments inside that affect the frequency coverage this way.

And if there is no difference in power between the VFO and a crystal on the same channel, the radio's internal alignment may be at fault. Until you get all of them adjusted right, there' no way to pin down which circuit is the bottleneck.

Since the radio was built with 23 channels of bandwidth, there was some tweaking of adjustments that could spread it out some. This consists of peaking one slug below channel 12, and the next one above. Textbook name for this is "stagger tuning". The factory alignment will tell you to peak everything on channel 12. Not the best way to get more band coverage.

73

[cadillaccharlie]

Thanks Sandbagger!  You cleared up my concerns on using a VFO. You were a great help and explained it well! Much appreciated!

73s