Hi again. Well, the WX is getting hotter by the day and tourists now seem to outnumber the locals by abt 20:1.
It was nice to meet some of you again at the Robin Hood a few weeks ago. Deez took some photos of the occasion and so I guess that these will appear in a blackmail letter at a later date.
It seems a short month this time as, apart from being away for 10 days, since returning I have been busy working at the old QTH and time seems to have flown by these past few weeks. We have had the Kritsa house on the market for some time and this spring we have been making sure that the old place looks at its best. I have also had to rebuild part of the Pergola as, at it has been exposed to the sun and rain for the past 12 years or so, some of the thin wooden supports for the bamboo needed replacing.
While over in Blighty, I swapped the Icom 7k for the new Kenwood TS-590S and so what follows are a few of my views and observations on it after a couple of weeks. None of your sensitivity figures or how wide things are at 6dB down, but how it is to use, both in everyday operating and also in contests.
The picture below shows the set up prior to the CQ WPX Contest. The J49 call on the top is to remind me which call to use! [Please note that the shack desk is not usually this tidy – The Station Manager]
The 590 is easy to use. Anyone could turn it on and, in true Amateur Radio tradition, have it up and running without needing the manual.
Of course reading the manual makes things so much easier and should you be interested in buying the rig, you can download the full manual from the Kenwood site and have look see before sitting in front of the rig in a dealer’s showroom.
Like all modern rigs, this beast has a menu system and again, even without the manual, you can find your way round any settings you would like to change quite easy. For example, the default screen colour is orange. If you want to change it to green just press the ‘menu’ button, turn the ’Multi Ch’ knob round until the words on the screen say ‘Color’ (US spelling) and press the up/down buttons to switch colour. Simple.
The manual though does give a list of all 87 options so it is a lot easier to refer to the book!
After looking at the settings you can alter, I did change a few.
The first was the keying mode, A or B, where B is the default but A is what I am used to. I also changed the sidetone volume as I thought it was a bit loud and this is not set by the AF control. I also changed the tone itself, the default being 800 c/s and I like 750. However I even reduced this to 700c/s after a week of operating. The CW rise time is set at 6ms (default) but 4ms is better for me, and of course I changed the screen colour to green as green is more restful for these tired old eyes . . . Also Kenwood have put in a ‘GØLWI Keyer’ option in their menu system so you can swap round the way your paddle works!
As I only use the rig on CW, two things stick out straight away when compared to the Icom 7000. One is the background noise and the other are the filter settings.
If you listen on a ‘dead’ band, the hiss you hear on the 7k is high pitched but the 590 is much, much lower. This takes some getting used to as you think that you have some narrow filters switched in when you haven’t as it sounds ‘hollow’. This was changed by altering the DSP RX Equaliser on Menu 31. Two clicks and the ‘problem’ was solved, well, to my ears anyway.
The little Icom had three filter widths and you could set the three to any bandwidth you liked. This was fine, you could have, say, 1.5kc/s, 700 c/s and 300 c/s and depending on condx and QRM you could switch through the widths. However, the 7k is not a ‘contest rig’ and if you were playing in a contest (we are talking CW here), should the QRM get bad, if you were using the pre-programmed buttons to send your call, for example, you had to come out of this, scroll through 3 separate menus, alter the filter width and return to the pre-programmed buttons again. This was a pain and prior to checking out the 590, I read and re-read the manual on CW filter widths, there being only two to choose from.
You can set each filter to the width you require and this is done by turning the Lo/Width control. As you turn the control, the width is graphically shown under the ‘S’ meter and SWR display and the actual width is also shown momentarily on the right of the display. However, the rig remembers the last settings so that when you switch from filter A to filter B the width is as it was last time you used that particular filter. For example, the normal filter is A and you have the width set at 2kc/s. You hear a weak station and press for filter B. This width will be the same as it was when last you used it, say 600 c/s. OK, so you want to narrow it down even more, you turn the Lo/Width control and narrow it down to 400 c/s. You copy the station and then realise that it is Vlad again and decide not to call him so you press for filter A and jump back to 2kc/s again.
Next time you switch to filter B is will be at the previous setting, i.e. 400 c/s but this is no problem as should you want a wider bandwidth, just click the Lo/Width control and set it to what you want. After about two weeks of using the rig, I usually have the widths set at 1.5Kc/s and 600c/s. This covers most eventualities but a quick twist on the Lo/Width control and I can have my desired bandwidth in an instant.
A Pre-Amp is automatically switched in on the higher HF bands but this can be cancelled by using the ‘PRE’ button on the front panel. It is not often you want the pre-amp on as the gain of the receiver is such that more often than not, I back off the RF gain anyway.
The RIT and XIT are dead easy to use and although they have the same range as the Icom, you do not have to keep turning and turning the knob to move the RX frequency a great deal.
In the RadComic review Peter Hart said that he found the controls ‘fiddly’. I found them far larger than the 7k controls and hence much easier to use. They are also bigger than the 735 controls and about the same size as those on the Yaesu FT-950. The other thing that Peter Hart mentioned was that the DSP Noise Reduction could be fierce. He is not kidding. When selecting NR1 or 2 you have to be careful setting the level or the result is an unreadable signal. However, getting the level right reduces the noise dramatically.
The Notch control works well, even on the ‘Wide’ setting, and can reduce off frequency splatter making copy much easier.
I worked just over 100 contacts in the CQ-WPX shindig and so used more of the controls ‘in anger’. Some things really shine in a contest environment. The ‘Fine Tuning’ for example: press the ‘Fine’ button and you change from 10Hz to 1Hz tuning and what a difference this makes! Separating the stations becomes easier and with the wide notch in circuit, reception is a breeze. I can now hear the DX, however, they still can’t hear me but ‘twas ever thus . . . Again the Lo/Width control came to the fore and easily changed bandwidth whenever I needed to. For the majority of the contest I ran with the Pre-Amp switched off. This kept the background noise down but allowed full copy even though condx were not what you would call ‘good’.
The only thing that the filters could not deal with was the QRM caused by the static rain we had on the Saturday morning when we had a shower pass through.
I suppose for serious contest work I should get the rig and the laptop talking to one another and use something like Winkey. I reckon the rig would then really be at its best under contest conditions. However, for the moment I will continue to ‘play’ at contesting and just give away a few points to the deserving.
I have not tried the rig on SSB (washes mouth out) or tried any of the fancy stuff like scanning. Maybe it is me but I do not understand why they put a scan feature on a rig when there is a large tuning knob on the front!
Even with only a few weeks operating, I am surprised how quickly I have got used to the rig and all the features I use. Having set the NR levels as I like ‘em and the filter widths etc I find that listening is less stressful than with the little Icom.
However, even with a new rig like this, there is one thing I would change.
The RF and AF controls are on the bottom right-hand corner of the front panel – no problem with this but if they were on the left-hand side, they could be adjusted without the need to take my hand off the key, me being right-handed.
The other stupid thing is – I miss the clock on the 7k. I know I have a clock showing on the pc screen all the time but do I miss the little clock on the 7k!
At the time of sending this ‘Blog’ to Deez I have only seriously used the rig on 20m. I have had the odd QSO on 40 and 15m but put up a 20m GP just for the CQ WPX so I will play more on the other bands at a later date. I have also had the rig wired for 5Mhz and will programme the channels in later. We ‘hope’ to get 60m out here sometime this year but the Greek Government are not the fastest in deciding this sort of thing.
I am not much into ‘computer control’ as I see no benefit in pressing a button on a keyboard when there is a knob on the radio sitting next to the computer, but I have been advised to try it out. So far I have failed to get anything working as I do not understand what a ‘virtual port’ is. I read the instructions but they are about as clear as a 1952 London Smog and so in a few weeks I will take rig, laptop and instruction manual over to Heraklion and let the experts try and fathom it out. Meanwhile I will just play with simple CW . . .
This is not a comment just about the 590 but all rigs in general. Why do they have such a short bail? I rest mine on a covered piece of wood (see picture above) so as to raise the controls up higher and you often see this in shack photos or even the rig is placed on a low ‘shelf’ so the controls are easier to get at. The only time you see the rig sitting normally is when there is a photo of a DXpedition station, where the RX and TX frequencies are fixed and the chap operating is just pressing buttons on a keyboard!
I also picked up a Watson Max 25 NF power supply while at W&S. Anyone else got one of these? Reason for asking is that while it sits on the desk and is only powering up the 735 on receive at about 1.2 A, the fan keeps cutting in and out and varying in speed. The temperature in the shack is currently only 24c and so not hot – but more on this next time.
Meanwhile, back to the bands . . .
Yassas
Dick.. SV0XBN/9.
