I finally finished my usb sound card/vox interface. The original post with the schematic is here. I started with a small plastic project box. I cut a hole for a usb b port and made up a small usb extension cable for the soundcard. Now I can use a standard usb cable to connect it to a computer. Next, I added the potentiometers. One controls the audio drive/volume, the next is the ptt trigger sensitivity, and the last is the ptt delay.

I’m starting to fix up some of the test gear that I recently acquired and first up on the bench is a sencore frequency counter. The frequency counter appeared to work, but the display wasn’t working correctly and the measurements seemed to jump all over the place. First, I replaced most of the electrolytic capacitors and that seemed to settle down the readings. Next, was the display. Four of the seven segment displays were not lighting up correctly.

I’m waiting on parts to fix up some other gear, but I did bust out a few of the power supplies that were laying around and decided to clean them up a bit. Most of them were pretty old, but I recapped them and adjusted them to the proper voltage. There was one variable supply that was in pretty good shape. I recapped it as well.

Diving deeper into my recent score, I found quite a bit of old heathkit test gear. There are two signal generators, two condensor checkers, and a signal tracer. I cleaned them all up and took a closer look. They will all need to be recapped, but I couldn’t help myself and I just had to see if they worked. I hooked a few of them up to a variac and slowly brought them up to line voltage and from what I can tell, they are working okay.

Last night, I started testing out a few things from my new haul. First up was an Icom IC-245 2 meter transceiver. From what I have read, these radios don’t seem to be well regarded and it seems that I am lucky that the thing actually works. I does work though, at least on receive. I need to find the mic for it. I hooked it up to my j-pole and was able to decode aprs packets.

Last week I ran across a cryptic one sentence craigslist ad about ‘comm equipment’. There was no pictures or any other information, but I went ahead and emailed anyway. My email received a response with a phone number, which I called and found out that there was ‘a little bit of everything’. That didn’t tell me much, but I made plans to stop by on Saturday to see what he had.