Are old as good as new transceivers?

[Gene Hirschman]

My Ten-Tec Jupiter is decades old. It seems to have receiver problems. I hear only the strongest stations. Transmit seems to good but I'm only linking up with strong signals. My antennas (20 and 40) are commercially made and SWr is very low and I run an ATU 100 EXT auto tunnere. Is it time to drop some bigger bucks and buy a new radio?

 

[Ham4CW]

The Ten Tec Jupiter is a nice looking rig, I'm amazed it's as old as you make out. I'm an engineer by trade so my first reaction if it were mine would be to check under the hood and look for any obvious issues. I just had a quick look at the manual for your radio and I see there appears to be lots of relays in there. I wonder if any of those could have dirty contacts or maybe they are stuck?

I used to own an FT-707 and that had no end of weird problems, all traceable back to defective relays (I think there were maybe 15-20 or so).

Some of the new rigs with digital filtering and waterfall displays etc. are marvellous to say the least. I have one or two here, but I always have a nagging voice in the back of my head talking about how difficult it will be to replace certain parts in the future.

Even when I worked 'in the trade' repairing Amateur gear it was surprising how many times we could not get spares for rigs that were only a few months old, let alone decades.

I find that YouTube is a good source of try-before-buy videos, you get to see the good and bad points of many rigs.

73, Mark...

 

[Ham4CW]

My Ten-Tec Jupiter is decades old. It seems to have receiver problems. I hear only the strongest stations. Transmit seems to good but I'm only linking up with strong signals. My antennas (20 and 40) are commercially made and SWr is very low and I run an ATU 100 EXT auto tunnere. Is it time to drop some bigger bucks and buy a new radio?

I just re-read your post again. Something that nags at me is that you say the SWR of the antennas is low, but you also run an external tuner. Is the SWR of the antennas low without using the tuner? The reason I ask is because I've seen issues in the past where the feeder, or even patch leads, have been open/shorted or even burnt through, and the ATU's have masked the problem by still giving the appearance of a good match between the rig and antenna system.

Just a thought!

73, Mark...