I had a nice hour's drive on a beautiful autumn's lunchtime to collect my IC-746 in person, a nice gesture from the e-bay seller.
As promised, the rig is indeed in 'mint' condition, showing no signs of use at all. My trusty FT-450, also an e-bay purchase, was in a similarly good condition.
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| Some kind of order returns to the operating position. |
Of course, with limited space for my equipment, I had to reconfigure and rewire a lot. I also took the opportunity to vacuum rather an alarming amount of dust from around and within my FT-450! A certain amount of woodwork was also needed to make everything work together.
The IC-746 is, I have to say, a lovely rig. The sound coming from its internal speaker, or when passed to external speakers, is fantastic, and a huge improvement on the FT-450. Rather luckily, as soon as I switched on, I heard a FP station calling by numbers, and managed to complete a SSB QSO easily with him - a new DX entity for me, though I'm surprised I've never heard from FP-land before.
Unfortunately, the 746 doesn't cover TX on 60m, but I'm not very often on that band anyway, and the FT-450 can easily be switched into action if needed.
No action on 2m - the reason for acquiring the 746 in the first place - as yet. A decent Yagi is on the list of 'to buy' things, so I will certainly be ready by summer!
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