The AM Forum

Heard a guy on from Texas this morning using a Kenmore TS-2000. He was adjusting stuff and getting a few audio reports along with the norm conversation : )
Sounded OK hora in NJ. I have one of these rigs and I think the AM frequency response is better than many later riceburners. I have observed this model to be incapable of modulating more than about 90 percent positive. It's not a headroom issue. It seems to be built into the software. When audio levels are hotter than the level that yields 90 percent the audio will start pumping as if it is going through a limiter with a slow decay time.
Just what I've seen here with mine.....

Stupid Crackberry does not allow typo fix after the fact.....

the TS870 firmware limits modulation to something real low like 70%.  Kenwood engineers trying to make the rigs idiot proof.  they probably recognize the fact that the vast majority of their customers are plug and play appliance ops who don't even own oscilloscopes and don't know how to use them so kenwood thinks these little "all knobs clockwise" darlings need to be kept out of trouble.

The TS-950SD and SDX allow tailoring the AM to at least 3100Hz wide. Its no major task to TX thru the 6KHZ AM filter and hack the DSP settings for the TX audio.

For now I TX at 3100 but can listen at 6 or 12KHz.

Carl

Those are nice passband widths.  I don't know anything about the 2000; I think the 870 came out after the 950--the 950 was probably the last rig they made that was hackable.  I've heard (but cannot recall details now) that around a year ago, someone at Kenwood who worked on the 950 design spilled the beans on some kind of front panel "secret menu" access that allows for extending the SSB tx bandwidth; don't know if it has any application for AM or not.  The 150 w. PA probably makes it a pretty robust low power exciter for AM.

There are DSP tweeks for the TS-2000 bandwidth on ssb. Have not seen them for AM.