Saturday, July 9, 2011

A couple of people have asked me about my ham rig.

It is a British made RT-320-L, made by Plessy, a British outfit. The 'L' indicates that the SSB mode in in lower side band, while the non-'L' rigs are in upper sideband. Mine was actually made for export to Yugoslavian forces, but it looks like it was never issued.

It covers pretty much the entire HF band except for 160 meters, between 2 Mhz and 30 Mhz.

It is a manpack rig and it came with a backpack to carry it in, but there are also pack frames available for it. It was designed for company level communicatons and can easily been toted about by one man. It runs on a 24 volt battery and has a generator kit as an accessory that can be used to keep the battery charged indefinitly.

It has a built in antenna tuner and there are a number of antenna configurations ranging from a whip to longwire to dipole arrangements, including a 5.4 meter mast kit. All of the accessories are designed for portable field use and are easily broken down or wound into neat little packages that can easily be man packed.

I bought it with a lot of accessories, as I have a tendency to keep all of my options open and I am seriously thinking of tossing the rig into my vehicle and taking it on the road with me to set up in odd places to try my luck.

There is a mountain top along US 30 that looks like it ought to be a pretty good place to set up my little station and report on things I see from such a vantage point and the fact that I can do this without AC power sounds pretty cool to me.

It ought to make for an interesting time, and I am seriously thinking of making a special QSL card for little ventures of this sort. Kind of an 'On the road' QSL card.

We'll see. It sounds like a 40 meter venture.




my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/

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