Steve wrote:
Travis, and Nitespark!

Well the that sounds nice, but dont think its the fuel
pump! Did the ground strapping on monday, my day off
for the holiday, seemed to lower the noise sum, did
make 6 turns of coax (rf choke) at the end of coax before it
goes in to rig, to cut down on transmission of rf chasing
back out!

But the engine still almost dies on 75 meters, not so much
on 40. Never did try 17 meters, bands been so bad of
late i just cant get motivated to do this!
May try this weekend, and you all say would ford dealer
carry this retrofit for noise suppression on their
vehicles? Or could i order via hr on the net? I see
lots of promises but do they really work?

Would some new coax help? some of the double shielded
stuff, RG-8 ???? with a foil wrapped on the outside of
the casing? Or could it just be this older Icom HF rig?

Now i did hear on the the newer 706's series the noise
blanker is better shape than the earlier ones?

OK, I was just making some suggestions. A Ford dealer should be able to
tell you if there is a retro filter kit for your model vehicle.

If you decide on going with bigger cable and you might want to consider
Belden 9913.

I might try a length of RG8X first though. It isn't going to cost that
much for a 20ft length.

My guess is, you have RF ingress and egress from the truck computer and
unless it is completely shielded with some sort of metal shroud, you
will continue to experience problems. Even that may not help, if the
spurs from the computer are emitting from the harness and the harness is
capturing the nearfield RF from your antenna.

A friend of mine is a comm tech for the local school board. He got a
1995 Ford Explorer as a service vehicle. When he mounted some VHF high
band and UHF radios in there for work, he was getting birdies all over
the spectrum. He never was able to suppress them, and basically just
had to live with them. I also have a 1995 Explorer and just out of
curiosity, we checked and our two vehicles were manufactured within 2
weeks of each other. When he took an HT on the same frequencies and
held it around the engine compartment of my vehicle, it was perfectly
quiet. He had even gotten a new computer to put in it, and that didn't
help.

You are correct about the newer 706 models. The IC706 had some serious
design flaws in the receiver. The 706MKII and MKIIG corrected those
flaws and added UHF in the "G" model.

I don't know that much about the receiver of the IC730.