About two weeks ago my dad and I took a trip up to a Facebook Marketplace listing that had some radio equipment for sale – it was a lot of legacy equipment, single band Kenwood VHF rigs, Collins, Drake, a bit of Harris, and a small stack of TS-520 and 830’s. For entertainment value, and for the $100 price tag knowing I could parts it out for more than that, I took a chance on a TS-830s. It had no power cord, so there was really no way to determine if it would so much as power on until I got it home and put a little work into it.
It would be a couple of days before I would get to do much on it due to the VHF contest starting the next day, however the first thing that I did when I got home was open up the case, first popping open the top to see just how clean or corroded everything was, and next I opened up the bottom to evaluate the power cord situation – it was nothing but a standard 120v AC cord that needed to go on, but I did want to make sure that there wasn’t excessive damage to it. I was shocked at just how clean this thing was – other than a little dust which was solved by a couple of hits of compressed air, it looked fantastic inside.
The power cord I was a little worried about, after looking it over it appears that when this was removed from the estate it came from, someone ripped the power cord off. After looking over the solder joints, everything appeared structurally sound. I found cord sitting in a drawer from a dead electronic, lobbed off the connector on the side that would hit the power supply, and soldered it on. Fired right up!
It was another day before I could get the ladder out, switch the coax over to the HF antenna, and actually test TX/RX – but when I finally got around to that my tuner meter was showing full 100w output power. Only downside is that the microphone that I was able to get with it (the MC-50 Desk Mic) was not functioning, so I did order a new hand mic to test it with. That should arrive by the end of the week hopefully.
This will be a fun little boat anchor to play around with for a little bit, though I’m contemplating selling it to buy something a little newer, and that will fit what I do a little better.
Roving On 