Bob Dobbs wrote:

I should have said the ICF-SW77 an exalted Sony 'upgrade' to the venerable
ICF-2010. It had more memories and an equivalent quantity of difficulty in
programming the alphanumeric tags and group assignments, but the fatal flaw in
addition to the dirt prone tuning wheel was the chuffing sound when using it.
About the only positive point over thw 2010 was the syncdet was selectable,
even though it didn't lock and perform as tight.

I've never used a SW-77, although I had one of the first '2010 in the US.
A friend of mine at the time was a gray market importer, and air-freighted
the first batch from Japan.

It's a great receiver, although I no longer use it, I occasionaly take it down,
replace the micropressor memory/clock batteries and stroke it. Along the way, I
lost my 240 volt AC adapator for it, and I guess I'll replace it real soon
now. I still have the original 100 volt one that came with it.

With the sync detector, it receives AM well. IMHO the tuning is too coarse
for SSB or CW, but it's ok for casual listening. I always found that it was
lacking sensitivity for UTEs. Adding an AMECO PT-3 (18db preamp with a tuned
front end) fixed that deficency.

At this point, I think though if you were going to use it for UTEs, I would go
for something more capable in that range, e.g. a Kenwood R5000. If you can get
one with no add ons, but a resonably fresh battery and the PLL fix, it would
be a good start. You don't really need to add anything at all, although a
narrow filter might be nice if you want to dig that CW signal out of
the QRM, but I'm not sure there is very much of it left outside the ham bands.

There is lots of QRM from digital sources, but a narrow filter is not going
to help with that.

Geoff.


--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation.
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.