New transceiver for the shack - with valves!

Great day at Dural today. Particularly impressed with the home brew moving coil compass built for a model boat. I didn't mean to but ended up walking away with a beautiful Yaesu FT-101E for $200.

Had a contact with Stephen, VK2BLQ, who reports that I sound normal so that's all good. Plate and Load knobs are new to me but fun to learn about.

For my younger readers, this is what a valve looks like:

The compass was fascinating, it uses a spinning coil with an amplifier in the centre. Power is fed in through the ball bearings and the output is sent by an LED light.

We turned it on and compared with a compass in a smartphone.

A wonderful device, but I think technology may have moved on.

Update

Here's a video of what it's like to tune across 20m on the FT-101E back in the flat with a dipole on the balcony.


We're moving out of the unit back to the normal QTH in a few weeks so I thought I'd capture this for future reference.