On Sun, 7 Feb 2010 10:42:59 EST, Art Clemons
wrote:

wrote:

4) The Lister is simple enough that a reasonably-knowledgeable non-
professional can do whatever is needed to build and maintain a genset
based on one. I think the same should be true of Amateur Radio rigs -
maybe not all of them, but certainly at least some. While they may not
be as fancy or "state of the art" as some, what matters is they work.

There are presently a lot of radios that are relatively reliable even if
fixing them might be beyond most hams. I've built Heathkits, simple cw
transmitters and receivers and bluntly to fix most, I'ld need more test gear
than is likely to be available on the spur of the moment. Yeah, I know how
to use an antenna analyzer as a signal generator or as a relatively poor
GDO, and I almost always have a 50 watt dummy load. I suspect that there
presently isn't a ham equivalent of a Lister engine and unless somebody
builds one, there won't be. Besides for ham radio, such rigs would need
spare parts and some place to work on them. A spare radio would still be a
better choice than one that can be fixed in five hours when time is of
concern. Of course if you can find or design a kit that's functional,
reliable and has easy to acquire spare parts, I'ld like to try building one.

One other point, making rigs simple often amounts to having to limit what
frequencies are covered. It doesn't do much good to have let's say an 80M
cw rig if contacts are more likely on 40M, or that's where people can hear
you. The Icom MKIIG and Yaesu FT-857 are relatively small, relatively
reliable, run on 12 volts and are relatively simple to operate. I have a
TS50 for HF, but it's getting really long in the tooth, not sure I'ld want
it as my sole rig in an emergency. For an emergency, I would prefer one of
them especially if I had several. Switching power supplies are relatively
tolerant of voltage variations produced by generators so they could be used
to power such rigs assuming you have fuel available for a genset.

Finally, maybe we're both ignoring the possibility that the best approach
would be complicated rigs that diagnosed their own problems and indicated
which module to replace or repair. Given a collection of the modules most
likely to fail, that would be the real ideal choice.


Ditto.

I've been licensed since 1958 and have gone through a boatload of rigs
-- old, new, military surplus, homebrew, QRO, QRP.

I lived in Bay St. Louis, MS, when Hurricane Katrina took out the
town. My FT-857 with the ATAS-120 antenna mounted on the back of my
truck provided the only commo in and out for about 12 hours until
National Guard arrived.

I'm not familiar with the ICOM or Kenwood equivalents but the FT-817
and -857 seem to me to be almost perfect emergency rigs: Cover
80-435, all modes; very complex rigs but can be set up for simple
operation; reliable; very portable; low power requirements. In fact,
with a battery and a solar charger, the FT-817 could operate
indefinitely, as could any other similar rig with power throttled back
to around 5 watts.