I just realized that my Elmer forgot to give me a speaker for my Kenwood. He included a speaker for the Heathkit SB-102, but it has an RCA jack (as opposed to the Kenwood's 1/8") and it's attached to a bulky HP-23A power supply. I'm thinking of simply buying a 8 ohm speaker and a 1/8" jack, hooking the two with speaker wire (of which I've got plenty), and plugging it in. An external speaker is basically a speaker in a box, so this would be a speaker sans box. I'm not the type of guy to care about looks. My question is, will it work? Did anybody do this when they were a young, broke newbie like me?
Of course it will work, but it may not sound as good as the speaker that's already in the TS-130S.
Why would you want an external speaker?
Cause the internal speaker is fried. My Elmer confirmed this. He'd tested the 130 once, ages ago (he was a high school science teacher, and this was donated to the student ham radio program at the school), then forgot that the speaker was bad. When I got no sound, I asked him to test the radio, and he realized that the internal speaker was bad. Plug in headphones, ok. Grab an old Motorola speaker and plug it in, ok. But no sound out of the internal. "Well, oh yeah, now I remember..." He gave me an old generic CB speaker, but THAT one turned out to be cooked too! Not my day. I finally bought a cheap MFJ speaker off QTH swap.
If you want to "hear stuff better," cheap headphones are usually better for hamming than any kind of speaker.
