NIB Washington off center on USB transmit

[LeaderSpeak]

I am getting out alright but, several have told me that my audio sounds high-pitched or off-center when I transmit on USB. No problems receiving on AM, LSB or USB.

This is a NIB President Washington from the 80's. Suggestions?

 

[Robb]

Unless you have the right equipment and some electronic repair experience, send it to a qualified shop.
Sounds like it needs an alignment - at least.

 

[Shadetree Mechanic]

Should probably be recapped.

 

[M0GVZ]

Unless you have the right equipment and some electronic repair experience, send it to a qualified shop.
Sounds like it needs an alignment - at least.

Or their stations do. I had several people in a town I lived in complain my radio was out. It was an Icom 7000 with a TXCO and was bang on frequency, maybe a few hertz off when checking against WWV. It turns out during the course of conversations that they'd all had their radios aligned by one particular "rig doctor." Now I knew this person, I had been round his house and knew he had neither the equipment or the knowledge to be in a radio with tools. I strongly suspected that he'd used his own off frequency rig as a receiver for aligning the transmit of these radios.

 

[nomadradio]

If the radio really is NIB and has no mileage on it, you probably won't have electrolytic caps fail until you put a few miles on it.

The stock setup on that radio is for the transmit frequency to be "fixed", set by a small trimmer pot and another small trimmer capacitor inside. The front-panel fine-tune control is only active in receive mode. The FCC made this a requirement around 1974.

To participate in a round table with more than one station, it's very handy for everyone to transmit on the same frequency. Kinda hard to do with radios that have this stock setup, since the setting of that trimpot inside the radio will never be exactly the same for all the radios on the channel.

This makes "cutting loose" the front-panel clarifier a popular modification. This way, everyone is transmitting on the same frequency that you're receiving.

So long as there are only two stations in the conversation, there is no reason to do this. They can tune each other in just fine. But as soon as that third station comes on the channel. he has to choose which one to clarify, or twist the knob every time a different station keys up.

The conversion is not a big deal.

Just the same, it's also possible that the radio's internal frequency settings for each separate mode have drifted since the radio was built.

This is the bugaboo of sideband. Fine tuning is critical to get clear audio.

73