7000DLE Black Edition, when did you receive it????

[Dave30019]

I ordered a 7K MKII Black Edition from HRO in late January. When & where did you order one from? Just curious if anyone one has received one lately and what shape the supply chain is in.

Thanks,
Dave
k4em

[administrator]

Hi Dave,

We have shipped several to HRO last week, your order should be fulfilled next week,

Regards,

Apache Labs Support

[Dave30019]

Thanks for the quick reply, looking forward to the new radio.

Dave
k4em

[Joe-W4WT]

I just received mine today. It is serial number 107. I Ordered it from HRO on 3/28 so pretty fast delivery even though HRO told me to expect delivery to take two or three weeks.

Some observations. It came with nothing but a power cable. I noticed the cable was a good bit shorter than the cable I received with my 200D some years ago. Additionally, it didn't have any rubber feet on the bottom nor were any in the box. This is surprising as it needs a little bit of elevation for the fan to operate properly, I believe. You also don't want to scratch your desk. Fortunately I had some black stick on feet in my parts stock that fit nicely. I also, as someone else mentioned, found all the hardware on the back panel needed to be tightened. One of the BNC nuts took three turns. It was loose to the touch. The on/off switch is a flat plastic toggle type switch. I don't know if it was put in upside down or not but you have to toggle it down to turn it on. Counter-intuitive. It is marked clearly though. If I ever open it up I'm going to turn that around, if possible. The case has no on/off markings just the word Power in white above the switch which again makes me think it should turn on with an upward press.

I run Thetis so after powering up and noting the heartbeat was good I loaded protocol 2 firmware v2.0B and set the radio to the IP address I use. I noticed the firmware switch on the bottom was not labeled, as mentioned before.

I set up Thetis from scratch using Doug's latest 2.7.0 that I compiled. During the setup I noticed while doing the PA adjustment that most of the bands were producing more power than the drive was set for (I set it for 50 watts) with the default PA settings. Even 6m ended up set to 45.8 to get 50 watts out. My 200D required most of the band settings to be lower numerically than the default settings, as best I remember. Just an observation. All bands set with no problems.

I noticed two spurs while I was doing the PA setup. One was on 60m (5.326) at -106dbm and one was on 80m (3.687) at -124dbm. There may be others as I wasn't really looking for spurs; just doing the PA setup.

When I finished setting Thetis up, I started listening around on the bands and everything seems to be working as it should. It is a nice looking radio. Still more to check out but so far so good.

Update: Just tested pure signal and it is showing a -73 with 100 watts. Really clean! This was on 10m.

Joe W4WT