Hi, Mark,
It was great meeting you at the Museum a few weeks ago, and talking about G-50's and such.
I remember back when I bought my first G-50, thinking that I could use an unassigned set of contacts on that rotary switch for keying external devices, but every contact on that triple-decker is used. But, several of those contacts switch B+ on transmit, so you could probably run that switched B+ to a resistive voltage divider, leaving just enough at the bottom of the string to drive the base of a transistor, or the gate of a FET, and use that to pull in a relay.
Yes, there's a lot involved in putting PTT into a G-50, and if it hadn't been for this one having a broken switch, I wouldn't be doing it. It's a fun project, but a lot of work.
I've got my original G-50 on the bench right now, for comparison with the PTT project rig, and next time I'm spending some time at the bench I'll power it up and give you a detailed report on the drift.
Bill,
Good luck with that G50 project, I thought about doing the same to my G50 but quickly dismissed the thought when I looked at what would be involved. One thing I wish was provided on the G50 is an extra set of contacts for T/R. I wanted this to turn on and off an external VFO. I am not sure if you have ever checked the TX VFO drift on your G50, but it is terrible on mine, greater than 25KHz in the first hour of warm-up from initial turn-on. You can literally blow on the TX VFO tuning cap and it will drift a few KHz and then come right back. I am not sure if this is normal for the G50 but if you can check it out on yours I would be curious to know if it behaves in the same way. So I am rock bound for now but if I had an extra set of contacts on that T/R switch I could key an external stable solid state VFO.
Mark WA1QHQ
