Lincoln 2+ tale of woe

Bought a widebanded Lincoln 2+ and got my licence as a toe in the water step into HAM, thought 10/11M would work well in the car as they could share an antenna etc, and it's not gone well.

For the first month, nothing, am I doing this right, double checking everything etc all seems OK. 

Set up a shack in the shed so I can concentrate better rather than sitting in the car, buy a dipole, still no better, buy a Sirio gainmaster on a 15 foot pole, still nothing.

Hearing the odd person, but nobody is responding to me, chat to the locals on the old CB still that's next to it on another dipole, or on my hand held dual band, but nothing on 10m, I assume it's because I'm being a good boy and sticking to 10w and they're all blasting it out. Also as it turns out, 10m is only really used between April and August, ho hum, didn't know that, on a spectruim analyser it looks utterly dead so maybe that's the issue, there's nobody to talk to at the moment. 

Another month goes by, still no joy, drive to remove hills to improve conditions, hear more stations, lots of Russian skip yesterday, but still nobody is hearing me.

Pop into Nevada radio and the chap suggested  firing up a local web SDR to see if it can hear myself to confirm I'm getting out, good idea! Find a local SDR, nothing, not on 11m or 10m, so, am I even getting out?? In the shack testing eveything as something must be amiss, the SDR is only ten miles or so away so it should really be getting my 10m shout, and when I'm working checking leads etc, I'm also calling out on CB CH19 on the Lincoln, no response, 12-15 calls over 45m, nothing, then somebody else calls out on CH19 immediately after me, and gets 5 responses? What the hell?? Hello, hello, can you lot hear me, nothing. Fire up my old 3.5w Allbrecht CB on the dipole and yes, they could now hear me! It's the bloody Lincoln itself that's not working! After all this time! Turns out one of them has a 10m unit and lives 2 miles away, so I ask him to fire it up so we can test the Lincoln on the the 10m band, which he does, but he can hardly hear me, so I wind up the mic gain from medium to high, and suddenly he can hear me, it was the mic gain all this time, so either that's badly set as the original medium setting should have been fine, or the mic itself is iffy. So we chat for a few minutes on 10m USB, and I wonder, is 11m working on the Lincoln too, so we swap and yes, it is! It's now working on 10m and 11m and apparantly I'm clear as a bell! Awesome! After all this time it's working! So we start chatting, and it blows up, totally dead, fuses are fine but it shorts out the power supply, with a smell of something burnt out, so a dead radio. So after two months of trying with no success at all due to either a faulty mic gain circuit or a faulty mic, I managed about 3m of conversation, then it broke, so back to Knights it goes. Arrgghhhh, just, bloody Aaaarggghhhh!!!!!!

Well, you may have a faulty mic, but remember, with sideband, there is no carrier, so an unmodulated signal won't produce any output; and power is proportional to modulation.  So whilst you don't want to over modulate, you need to to ensure you are modulating enough to get somewhere close to peak power of the radio on your voice peaks.

Pretty sure they are a multimode rig, so a test on FM or AM would prove it very quickly as to whether it is the mic.  It could be as simple as you talking too quietly or too far away from the mic, and hence adjusting the mic gain as you have fixes it for how you operate.

On an amateur set, we usually use the ALC display to set mic gain, so you're not clipping the signal on your voice peaks.  Also, and I don't know if the Lincoln has one, but a speech compressor will also "compress" and hence boost your average modulation, and we set both until we get nice sounding audio and decent power out compared to the radio power setting. 

Of course, none of this helps with a blown rig, but I thought some background to your sideband woes might help!

Check the power supply voltage it could be that at fault.
Seen this happen many times years ago when i was repairing.
They can fail but still look to be working but the voltage is at 28v or was it 26v but it will kill a radio whatever.
I am saying that in case knights replace the set and it blows again.

Have you made sure both RF power  AND mic gain controls are turned up? Does RF meter register when you key up? Have you tried different modulations? If you transmit on the lincoln can you hear it on the cb? If you transmit on the cb can you hear it on the lincoln? Good luck with the problem solving.

Sussed it, and it wasn't obvious, the little spring in the cigar lighter positive had broken so the pin was only occassionally making contact, but it had only partially broken so when I tested it, it appeared OK, springy, it had continuity fuses OK etc. I can't take credit as I removed it to send the radio back to the shop, and used it to create a banana post power supply for the car instead. Built it, tested it was OK, all good so plugged it in the power supply and it tripped the power exacty the same as before, so I looked at it again. Literally 2m later the shop phoned to say they couldn't find a fault on the radio! A mention for Knights,  they phoned me at 5pm on a Sunday night to let me know, very very impressive after sales. Felt sorry for wasting their time so bought an ATU lol.

welshwizard1971 wrote:

Sussed it, and it wasn't obvious, the little spring in the cigar lighter positive had broken so the pin was only occassionally making contact, but it had only partially broken so when I tested it, it appeared OK, springy, it had continuity fuses OK etc. I can't take credit as I removed it to send the radio back to the shop, and used it to create a banana post power supply for the car instead. Built it, tested it was OK, all good so plugged it in the power supply and it tripped the power exacty the same as before, so I looked at it again. Literally 2m later the shop phoned to say they couldn't find a fault on the radio! A mention for Knights,  they phoned me at 5pm on a Sunday night to let me know, very very impressive after sales. Felt sorry for wasting their time so bought an ATU lol.

Interesting tale welshwizard.
I have the Lincoln II + and only been out once with it.
I shall be watching out for the cigar plugs and springs.
Thanks.
Ken.