suggest gear ham test

ml wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news.optonline.net:

While I, as a ham radio operator and electronic technician (Metrology) appreciates your thoughts on the subject....knowing how cheap 99% of all ham radio operators born in the last 70 years are, I think you're seriously CRAZY! If you just need a hobby to bide your time and wile away the hours keeping your mind occupied, fine....go for it.

But, alas, if you think you're going to make a living fixing ham radio gear, just forget it and go work at Waffle House for more serious money.

Your other problem is that ham radios made in the last 30 years are very proprietary computer devices with everything controlled by software you'll never get access to, made by tight Japanese companies...Yaesu, Kenwood and Icom, for the most part. These rarely beak down unless lightning hits their antenna ports, rendering repair impossible as everything is just GONE! Older equipments that were, marginally, repairable, analog transceivers with non-proprietary, non-unobtanium parts belong to the very poor hams, among us, who are not going to pay you anything near a fair price for their repair as most of them fix the equipment themselves...as a hobby.

Do yourself a huge favor and put this nonsense out of your mind. If you live to be 200, you still won't recover any investment in test equipment off paying hams.....who are all dying of old age as there are so few new hams caused by the internet generation. The average age of any ham radio convention (hamfest) is somewhere around 60-70, now....a bunch of tired old men trying to unload the 1960's crap out of the garage so they can move into the retirement center with the free wifi.

There is no "simple" in RF.

Search for a "service monitor". You can live without the millivolt meter. You'll also need an RF watts-guesser, PL/DPL generator, 12V bench power supply, SINAD meter, and possibly an RF sweep generator. That's for analog radios. A dummy load, pile of attenuators, coax adapters, and cables, are alsos required.

If you're going to deal with old Motorola radios, you'll also need a really old 286 or 386SX computah, as the old programming software doesn't run on faster machines. You'll also need a wide variety of power cables, programming cables, and software depending on what you plan to repair.

Wavetek 3000 (old but cheap):

IFR-1500 (much better and not cheap):

The giant mess is optional.

Just about anything you purchase that resembles a service monitor that's over 10 years old is going to have dried out electrolytic capacitors, that might need replacement. For the Wavetek 3000 service monitor, you also get to replace ALL the tantalums. That's the price of buying cheap.

You're dreaming!

There is Tucker Electronics in Texas, Skycraft Surplus in Orlando, Florida and many others. Next weekend (Feb 11,12,13, 2011) there is the Orlando Hamfest at the fairgrounds. Larger Hamfests often have used test equipment dealers.

But the good stuff is not cheap. Perhaps a used Bird Wattmeter with various elements can be had for $100 plus $30 each element. Maybe an old HP 8640B signal generator for $300. Yes, E-Bay is a gamble. But so are the alternatives.

You can also take what you have and devise methods of testing for various parameters, until you get better equipment. For example, you can tune an HF radio to 20 MHz WWV and calibrate it so CW and CW-Reverse produce the same audio tone. If your ear is good, it could be more accurate than your counter.

Fred

On Sun, 06 Feb 2011 21:00:02 -0800, Jeff Liebermann wrote: (...)

I blundered across this web site:

that has a fairly complete lineup of what's needed to do repair work. You can probably live without the tubes and tube testers.

everything you said is sort of sad, but true.