Got a brand new President McKinley from Knights CB here in the UK. Had it widebanded so I could use it on 10m. Decided to check the power outputs today using my MFJ 993 and a dummy load.
On AM it would appear to have "backwards swing" so you key up with no audio and the S meter on the McKinley pegs to the right and as you talk the meter drops. The meter on the 993 shows just short of 15W when keying up and actually goes backwards as you talk. Monitoring on another CB radio and playing a tone so I can use a fixed audio level every time I play the tone the S meter on the receiving CB drops and the power measured on the 993 drops to about 6/7 watts so to me it's definitely negative modulation. If I drop the RF power down to it's minimum setting on the McKinley it works as it should other than the meter being on S7 with no audio but everything goes the right way as you talk.
Now this thing to me is screaming it's nuts off. It's a "deadkey" of 14W on AM, it's doing 27W on FM, it's doing 25/26W playing a two tone test signal into the mic on SSB. Talking to my first contact on it on SSB to someone who is about 20 miles from me they asked if I was using a power mike when I told them what radio I was using...
As those who use Knights know they checks every single radio on the bench before they give you it, me somewhat naively assuming its so they're doing 4W, 100% modulation and 2.5kHz deviation and not the 3.5W, 80% mod and 1.8kHz deviation pretty much all radios tend to come out of the box with here in the EU. Is the backwards swing due to them setting the AM carrier level being set too high? I'm kind of concerned that they're cranking everything up to 11 to keep the idiots happy which is not what I want. I do know that when you do the export mod it does up the power but it's supposed to be to about 20W.
On AM it would appear to have "backwards swing" so you key up with no audio and the S meter on the McKinley pegs to the right and as you talk the meter drops. The meter on the 993 shows just short of 15W when keying up and actually goes backwards as you talk. Monitoring on another CB radio and playing a tone so I can use a fixed audio level every time I play the tone the S meter on the receiving CB drops and the power measured on the 993 drops to about 6/7 watts so to me it's definitely negative modulation. If I drop the RF power down to it's minimum setting on the McKinley it works as it should other than the meter being on S7 with no audio but everything goes the right way as you talk.
Now this thing to me is screaming it's nuts off. It's a "deadkey" of 14W on AM, it's doing 27W on FM, it's doing 25/26W playing a two tone test signal into the mic on SSB. Talking to my first contact on it on SSB to someone who is about 20 miles from me they asked if I was using a power mike when I told them what radio I was using...
As those who use Knights know they checks every single radio on the bench before they give you it, me somewhat naively assuming its so they're doing 4W, 100% modulation and 2.5kHz deviation and not the 3.5W, 80% mod and 1.8kHz deviation pretty much all radios tend to come out of the box with here in the EU. Is the backwards swing due to them setting the AM carrier level being set too high? I'm kind of concerned that they're cranking everything up to 11 to keep the idiots happy which is not what I want. I do know that when you do the export mod it does up the power but it's supposed to be to about 20W.