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Reviews For: KDK FM144-10SXRII

Category: Transceivers: VHF/UHF+ Amateur Base/Mobile (non hand-held)

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Review Summary For : KDK FM144-10SXRII
Reviews: 3MSRP: 400
Description:
2m FM Mobile transceiver
Product is not in production
More Info: http://
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0034.3
N2MDV Rating: 2017-03-01
Wonderful barebones 2M FM rig from the mid-70's. Time Owned: more than 12 months.
Bought mine from a friend of whom was moving to Florida in late 1991. At that time, my only HAM rig was an HT, so this rig gave me a little more power and versatility. Low power = 1W, High = 10W. Wonderful TX audio quality from that accompanying CB style KDK mic. Internal speaker was just too tinny, but EXT speaker audio is very good. No CTCSS, but still good as a simplex rig, or for those few repeaters that are PL tone-less. That double-dial and +/-5KHz switch makes it so that you can dial-up any 2M FREQ in seconds. In my mind, it's as fast as a keypad. Mine came with an added, outboard, scanning unit, that I could never get to work, but B.F.D.. RX went out about a decade ago and most likely it is that FET on the front-end. I hope to fix it one day. CB style chassis kind of reminds me of later EF Johnson CB's style. Internal, this rig is a gut full of wonder, but all through-hole tech. A very fun rig, indeed.
VK5GI Rating: 2006-09-30
Totally Brilliant Time Owned: 3 to 6 months.
I bought this rig for $35 a few months ago from a deceased estate. I had been put into a shed and forgotten for years. Myself and a fellow ham fired it up and hey! it worked first time. It is a very good, solid rig that still does all you ask of it after 30 years (even I don't do that...!). If you find one, buy it. You will not be disappointed. Kind regards
K5ET Rating: 2004-02-20
almost a classic Time Owned: more than 12 months.
The KDK FM-144 10SXRII appeared in 1975 when synthesized VHF rigs were still something of a novelty. This was a revision of a slightly earlier
model that incremented in 10 khz steps, the 10SXRII would increment in 5 khz steps by pulling
one of the knobs on the front panel. The only
other popular "synthesized" rig at the time was
the Icom IC-230 which incremented in 30 khz steps,
but could be modded for 15 khz steps fairly easily
when "split-split" coordination came into play
around the same. There were some other "crystal-plex" rigs around at the time, notably the Clegg
FM-27B and a few other obscure types. But the KDK
was a true BCD synthesized rig as opposed to these
crystal-plex nightmares. Out of the box, the KDK
only covered 146 - 148 Mhz although the "Mhz"
selector switch covered all 4 mhz of the band. The
144 and 145 ranges had to be enabled by soldering
jumpers into the wafer switch. The VCO lacked
range to cover much more than 2 Mhz, but you could
get it to play on the 145 Mhz segment with a little tweaking although you might lose some coverage at the high end of the band. It used a
fragile Japanese mosfet (2SC39) in the front end
and these failed constantly, but a generic mosfet
such as a 40673 worked fine there and was far more
rugged. Same for the final which was a 2SC1605,
there were some generic tab-mount RF amp transistors that would work fine too. It was
strictly no frills, no scanning or memory channels, no sub-audible tone, and only 600 khz
offsets. If you needed something other than a
600 khz offset, a crystal board was available
that you could install to make any offset needed
by cutting it in with a toggle switch that you
mounted on the back on the rig. The rig had a
5-pin DIN "accessory" connector on the backplane
and you could easily rewire this for an external
sub-audible encoder. You could inject the tone
past the audio stages at the modulator and it
would encode tone just fine. I used a "Vega Box"
with it which was a selectable 4 tone encoder with the tones set with 20 turn pots. But a Com-Spec TS-64 would work fine as well. I used the
KDK for about 10 years but retired it when the
first generation dual-banders came out. But a
friend of mine who owned a 220 repeater was looking for a BCD synthesized rig to use a remote
base, so I gave the KDK to him and he used it as
a remote for many more years.