TS-830S_review.pdf

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1、TRIO TS -830 Three new bands and extra facilities are a lot of radio for your money By our Technical Editor AS we said in the review of the Icom IC -4E elsewhere in this magazine, were still in two (only two?) minds about how best to do our reviews. We feel we have a duty to discuss the equipment we

2、 review as honestly as possible bearing in mind what its intended to do, and from the point of view of the average amateur who is going to buy the thing. So when we decided to review an upper -middle class radio such as the Trio TS -830, there was a bit of head - scratching in the office. Should we

3、bombard everyone with spectrum analyser traces, IF filter plots and the like, or should we just say whether or not we think its a good rig. Weve decided, as a first effort, to evaluate it in the middle of the extremes, rather as we have done with the IC -4E, although obviously the TS -830 is rather

4、more complicated. Good reputation So - what about the TS -830? We thought wed like to review it because its the sort of radio you might buy if you were coming to the hobby and had enough of the folding stuff available to invest in a good piece of gear which would last you a long time and which will

5、do the job. The TS -830 is made by Trio - Japanese, of course - and is the lineal descendant of the popular TS -820 with the addition of the three new bands which the amateurs obtained at the World Administrative Radio P. .f r= , _. _ _ _ -I-VQ%- MFTG. SAM OLL.Mt p,. - l LIMO KM MOO Rtic , , d.141 o

6、YP Conference in 1979 (three cheers for the RSGB) and one or two extra odds and ends. In terms of facilities its the Volvo of HF transceivers; in terms of price its somewhere about the same. Trio equipment has had a good reputation for reliability for a long time now, and you often hear people on th

7、e air whove had a TS -520 (another popular Trio model) for years and years. Just to digress a bit, Japanese equipment in general seems to be extremely well put together from the reliability point of view - we dont know of the Japanese equivalent of a Friday car and weve only ever come across one ins

8、tance in about the last five years of a Japanese rig being faulty when bought. Trio equipment is, as weve said, highly regarded by amateurs, and the TS -830 itself is the second -in -line from the top -of - the -line TS -930. So we were smacking our lips when Mr Securicor brought the big packet into

9、 the office, and it was unpacked with great expectations. It was well protected in about three layers of cardboard and some expanded polystyrene, and there was a natty polythene dust cover -cum -packing material stretched over it. When we got our strength together to get it out of the box (it weighs

10、 about 30 pounds, so the carrying handle on the side is a great benefit) and put it on the editorial table, the first impression was of a good-looking radio with a well laid -out front panel and an OH air of nice design about it. The first job, of course, was to sit down and have a thorough read of

11、the instruction book. We dont subscribe to the if all else fails read the instructions school of thought, because a transceiver is a fairly complicated animal and it is possible to cause damage if you havent got the operation of it sorted out. This applies particularly to the transmitter side of thi

12、ngs. The TS -830 uses a pair of valves in its final amplifier, driven by another one actually, so there are three of those splendid glass devices in the transmitter. Now valves are several times more rugged than transistors, but you can still inflict various nasties on the power amplifier stage if y

13、ou dont tune it up correctly, for instance. Since it uses valves, the TS -830 has tuning and loading controls for the final amplifier stage, unlike its cousins which use transistors and which have broadband output stages. As weve discussed elsewhere in these pages, this isnt a disadvantage since bro

14、adband transistor final amplifiers arent the whole story, and youll find in practice - as we were to - that a valve final amplifier will cope with various forms of mismatching as far as the antenna is concerned rather better than the solid-state equivalent. Its swings and roundabouts really - youre

15、99 per cent certain to need an ATU anyway, even with a broadband output stage, and the extra two controls dont NOTCH rYt MVNOOtNBS 54 really make a significant difference in practice. The only point is that you need to follow the instructions carefully so that you dont knock hours off the life of th

16、e valves when tuning up. The handbook goes into it au very well, and we found that in practice tuning up became second nature. The handbook in general is very well done, with comprehensive instructions and all sorts of helpful operating hints thrown into it. Theres no trace of the strange Japanese -

17、 English which used to afflict handbooks from the Orient until relatively recently, and there are clear explanations of what goes where and which control does what. The section on maintenance and troubleshooting is good enough for basic maintenance although it isnt a workshop manual - here again, we

18、d hesitate to do major work on equipment such as this without access to some pretty decent test gear. The main distributors, who are Lowe Electronics up at Matlock, have an excellent reputation for servicing, and have a hundred thousand quids -worth of test gear for fixing Trio equipment - from what

19、 we hear theyre very good at it and offer a pretty quick turnround if your rig has gone horribly sick on you. Theres a full circuit diagram right at the back of the handbook and, in common with every Japanese circuit diagram weve ever seen, youll need a good magnifying glass to get much out of itl M

20、ind you, this one is better than some others weve seen . We liked the block diagram a lot, and our technical bod spent a good half-hour. poring over it whilst warming -up the test gear for his torture tests later on. Get the feel So - before we let him loose on it, it was time to connect the TS -830

21、 up to our tri-band antenna and have a listen round 15 metres to get the feel of the receiver side. The main tuning was a delight; it felt very smooth and stable, and it was no surprise to find some nice precision mechanical work in that side of things. As far as the receiver side is concerned, the

22、TS -830 has all the usual controls - RF gain, RF attenuator, S -meter, etc - but what makes this rig an absolute delight from the handling point of view are some features that you dont find on all receivers by any means. Well take them in the order in which we found them. The first nice thing was th

23、e noise blanker. The idea of a noise blanker is to help the operator copy signals through interference which comes from such things as car ignition systems, faulty electrical equipment and the dreaded Russian Woodpecker over -the -horizon radar system which sometimes makes life extremely difficult o

24、n 14MHz. Several rigs have some form of this, but that in the TS -830 is a rather superior sort which has a variable threshold. This means that you can set up the precise amount of noise blanking that you need without losing too much of the signal, and we found in practice that it worked very well i

25、ndeed. If it was wound all the way in, we found that the Woodpecker completely disappeared, which is no mean feat - no other rig weve tried can do that. The only slight thing here was that our technical wizard reported that the intermodulation performance of the receiver (thats a concept which descr

26、ibes how well it handles weak signals in the presence of strong ones, to simplify about 50 pages r d 41. o ( r I /4.) SyO,-ry - ( j fa r ): 1 A. a - - . a0 a . Y a Y R into two lines) was a bit worse with the noise blanker all the way in, but youll find that most rigs suffer from rather degraded int

27、ermod. performance when the noise blanker is switched on because of the way it works. Since on most rigs you cant vary the blanking threshold youre stuck with it, but we discovered that the noise blanker barely affected the IM performance until it was almost fully wound up. We liked Trios blanking c

28、ircuitry - its quite complex but it works very well indeed, so the devout 14MHz DX chaser will do well with this rig. While were on the subject of signal handling, we evaluated the TS -830 on 7MHz, since this is the band youre most likely to need a good front-end on. The third -order intercept on th

29、e review sample came out as +1 dbm; if that doesnt mean a thing to you, dont worry about itl In the real world of radio waves, its a reasonable performance; its not super -outstanding but in practice its very adequate to do the job. You tend to have to use rather exotic devices to get a really good

30、front-end on any receiver, and in some ways its more important that a VHF and UHF receiver has a high third -order intercept point than an HF machine. So we were quite happy with the TS -830s . Top: the innards of the TS -830. Above: a look at the rear, showing the PA cooling fan and the plethora (d

31、isgusting!) of connectors. performance. We appreciated the S -meter calibration as well; it was a good deal more linear than several rigs weve seen and a reading of S9 on the review sample required exactly 50 microvolts on the 7MHz band. The filtering arrangements are what make the TS -830 outstandi

32、ng on receive, however. As well as both an IF shift control and a facility to adjust the IF bandwidth - which is doing the job properly, in our opinion, unlike some rigs which simply have a passband tune control - theres a notch filter for removing whistles from those idiots who will insist on tunin

33、g up 1KHz away from the frequency youve been on for the last half- hour. This works well, and we measured the depth of the null on ours as a whopping 40 dB down. This means that you could reduce the amplitude of an interfering tone by about 6S points! From an S9 signal to an S3 is extremely good, an

34、d in using the TS -830 on 7MHz during the daytime we found it extremely easy to use the notch control to zap the interfering 55 TRIO TS -830 nitwit who was tuning up. A little LED comes on to remind you that its in circuit. We could write heaps of words about the receive side of the TS -830, but the

35、re isnt the space - suffice it to say that we were highly impressed with it and, unlike some rigs, it felt nice to use. We found that it took about two hours to get the feel of the beast and sort out what the filters and so on could do for us, and we worked just over 80 stations with it during the r

36、eview period. The best DX, by the way was an 8P6 on 7MHz and TYA11 in Benin (what an odd callsign he has - the story goes that the authorities thought he was applying for a commercial licence instead of an amateur one, and issued him with that distinctly odd callsign. Hes perfectly legal, and pretty

37、 rare), as well as miscellaneous VKs and ZLs. One gotaway was an XT2 - grrr. Ah well - it wasnt the rigs fault, we just couldnt crack the pile-up before having to go to work) So - how about the transmitter? First off, we measured the output power on all the bands, and it came out at between 110 and

38、120 watts when switched to CW. This, of course, is more than youre allowed in this mode, but you can use the carrier control on the rig to set it up to the magic figure of 20 dbW (or 100 watts in ordinary language). On Top Band, indeed, youre supposed to use 9 dbW, or 8 watts, and you can indeed set

39、 up the legal level very nicely with the carrier pot. Its important to stick to the rules on Top Band, since its shared with all sorts of other services and we dont want to cause problems for signals which might be a little bit more important than the fact that your mate is S9 plus 20 with you and t

40、hat its a nice day in Bridlington or whatever. Various coastal and maritime stations use Top Band, and indeed theyre the primary users, so always play the game and dont run more power than youre licensed for - it could just be someones life youre messing about with. The harmonics Anyhow - our next s

41、tep was to have a look at harmonics and other odds and ends which transmitters can produce. Our TS -830 was pretty sanitary on all bands bar 18MHz, and the reason for that is bound up with the design of the set. The final intermediate frequency in the TS -830, as it is in several other rigs, is arou

42、nd 9MHz and you cant really get good rejection of the second harmonic of it. We measured the spurious output on this band at -43 dB, which our king of the test gear thought wasnt too bad under the circumstances, and when he saw the circuit initially there was much head - shaking and dire prophecies

43、of terrible things on 18MHz but it wasnt so. The part of the circuit in question is called the balanced modulator and Mr Trio seems to have done his homework all right. One suspects that when we get the 18MHz band the power limit will be pretty low anyway, so therell be microwatts coming out as a sp

44、urious. (Were getting it from October 1 - Ed.) Anyhow, back to the salt mine. The classic test for an SSB transmitter is known as a two-tone test (something tells me well have to do an article on what all these things mean) and we applied said test to our TS -830. Basically, this test tells you some

45、thing about how linear the final amplifier stages are, and you often find that a valve PA stage is rather better than a transistor one. The Trio was no exception, and its intermod. performance on a two-tone test was really good. Its rather interesting that the RSGBs magazine, Radio Communication, re

46、viewed the TS -830 a couple of months ago, and they found that the transmitters performance under two-tone conditions got markedly worse after an extended period. We didnt find this at all with our one, and the figures on the analyser stayed pretty much the same throughout the transmitter tests. We

47、also got rather more power from our sample at the same intermod. level so we imagine that there was something a bit odd about the one they tested. Their man Peter Hart, certainly knows what hes doing - dont get us wrong - so we think that the one the RSGB reviewed was something of a rogue. It must b

48、e the London air! Good audio Anyway, enough of the figures -how did it perform on the air? Very well we found, and everyone we asked told us that the audio sounded very good and that the transmission was extremely clean and narrow. A narrow SSB signal implies good intermod. performance in the PA (pl

49、ease dont confuse this with the intermod. performance of the receive side, by the way - its a rather different use of the term, although it means almost the same insofar as both are to do with the linearity of whatever stage it happens to be), and it also means that you dont cause trouble to your fellows on the band. The speech processor worked well, and we found that all the DX we worked preferred the signal with the processor in and that all the locals on 80 metres with S9+ signals preferred it out. Which is just about wha