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Midland 79-290

coolhand

coolhand

CDX-297
Jul 27, 2005
37
0
16
49
Miami, Fl.
I have this radio in my daily commuter, works great on DX days and just talking to locals. My only complaint is the noisy recieve. Now I have read all the old post about this radio, took about 2hrs. There is some metion of a guy named Justin who was supposed to be the man when it came to these radios, does anyone know him? Also ther was a comment about grounding and shielding to help clean up the recieve. I have no engine or accesory noise its all just white noise. I love to be able to fix this one problem with the radio, It is a great little radio and full of features.

Thanks,

Coolhand
 

I've had one of those along with a 77-285A and while I occasionally wax fondly as though I miss them...I also seem to recall both had terrible signal rejection when it came to recieve. Both are/ were SMT construction which greatly inhibited circuit modification. I wish you well in your endevour to make this the radio it never was, but I'm afraid it's an uphill climb all the way.

In spite of it's shortcomings the 79-290 does have a lot of feature for it's size. A good tune-up was about all I ever found for this radio.
 
Justin used to be the do no wrong golden tech on this forum, I'm sure there are several of his jock strap holders still around that can tell you all kinds of great stuff.

There are several decent techs that can re-align and adjust the receive in your radio. DTB radio, 8541 Electronics, Custom cb radio, Sparkys, and Fire Communications just to name afew.
 
No, it's not a grounding issue. I had one of those radios and it always had a high noise floor. It was better than some other radios I've owned, though. There's not a whole lot you can do about it. One suggestion would be to purchase a DSP speaker, which will kill it, but that's not a cheap proposition. That also works pretty good for getting rid of ignition noise, alternator whine, and a few other problems.
 
These transceivers were notorious for static in the RX as well as poor adjacent channel rejection. I owned one and it was real bad in the mobile, not so much when it was on the base station.
 
Hey, I had one too! We can almost start a "past owners of the Midland 79-290" club. :tongue:

I recall mine was noisy too. Only ran it mobile and only kept it for a few months. Just too noisy, since most of my ragchewin' was fairly distant ground wave SSB bases (friends of mine) who tended to get annoyed at me for telling them I couldn't hear them properly due to noise!

It was a pretty neat radio, though, too bad it's so noisy in the mobile.
 
I own this AF DSP and it is _amazing_. You can plug it in between any rig and speaker for the most part too, makes it flexibile.

NEDSP-1062-KBD

I highly recommend it, it is effective enough that I can run FM with the squelch open and actually listen like that for quite a long time during a borderline distant QSO on simplex.
 

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