Bearcat 980 Tuning

Been busy the past couple months...sold house/purchased another, moved....work....time to slow down a bit now. Hence the lack of posts recently.

I actually replaced that Bearcat radio with a good old, tried-and-proven Connex 3300 just because I'm so old school I guess, and am familiar with the operation and simplicity of it. Still have the Bearcat and will use it again for sure...but this Connex just seems to have such a clean receiver that I am partial to it.

 

I have the same radio if you are going to run that amp then you will need to turn the power down to 1 watt for am and no more than 6 watts for SSB I have that same amp so I know it will talk real good with this done.You can do it your self if you have a good SWR and Watt meter.

 

I have one of those, and it did okay. It did receive well even though I had a mediocre antenna setup, and it could transmit fine as long as the other driver was line-of-sight. Probably be better on a tractor (I had it on my car) with a proper antenna and a better mount, and with an amp, though.

 

Is there a recommended amp that can be run with the 980 without having to have the radio power turned dowm?

 

Find something with 2 2sc2879 transistors in parallel.

 

There's not really such a thing as plug-and-play when it comes to radios and Amplifiers, but that should get you in the ballpark anyway. Technically the radio should always be retuned to match the amplifier and sometimes amplifier has to be modified to compensate for sloppy tolerances during the build

 

I have a 980 that ive been running in my big truck for months now and really like it. Out of the box carrier was 3.5 watts pep swing was 14 watts and ssb was 15 watts. Have not had any tuning done to it and everyone says audio is loud and clear with stock mic, but i did open up mic and remove adhesive peice of tape that they put on inside mic screen. When i first got radio i ran it in my f 150 into a palomar 450 fet amp and it had a carrier of 75watts swinging to 300 watts. One time i was talking to a local friend about 10 miles away and the amp got really hot so i shut it off, and much to my surprise he was still able to hear me fine barefoot so i have had the radio in my big truck ever since. To adjust the rf gain on mine you press the rf gain button and hold it in until the bar graph displays and adjust the level between 1 and 5 with channel selector knob, do not have to use the ptt like you have to when adjusting the mic gain which would make sense because it would require the use of both hands which isnt very practical when driving. Overall i really like the this radio and plan on keeping it hooked up.

 

I picked up a 980 from a driver calling it quits for $30. What is the USB and LSB used for? The driver I got it from told me it gave the radio 120 channels instead of 40, but I doubt that is the case.

Overall, though, I like the radio and is 100% better than the Bearcat PC787 I was running.

 

Usb is upper sideband mode and lsb is lower side band mode, single side band is a mode that is more effecient for voice transmission because it does not require a carrier, before i try to explain it anymore, and confuse both of us, it would be best if you googled it or wait for some better explanations, but i thought i would at least let you know what the letters stand for.