Home Alone Ham...

Its a (stupid) tradition here to have at the beginning of December "Home Alone" at TV.
So, I choose not to watch to because I do have a lot to do!
I recently (re) finished my HF backpack kit and I am looking forward for my new LiFe battery to get rid of the heavy SLA one!
Basically, it's an ICOM IC-703. Yeah, the one that I trade a TS480 SAT for!
After it had some problems due to an idiot (me) who put a FT2000 to tune directly to the input of the ICOM, I managed to make it again like new! I had to change the pre-driver and the little uPC which attack the pre-driver and some SMD inductances and after just a few minutes of QSO one of the final transistors gave up but now, everything it's OK.

I even want to make a small external Z-match to be able to tune balanced antennas like G5RV but I gave a second chance to the wonderfull internal ATU and made just an external matcher for the Racal foldable vertical whip which I often use on portable HF.

No, the schematics is not on public domain because I had a hard time fine tuning it, but if anyone need to have a diagram, I will send it via e-mail. An antenna analyser is a must!
In a few words, that box change the sign of the imaginary part of the antenna impedance, make it easyer for the internal antena tuner. 

After I repair and realigned the radio, it was the perfect time to finally made the handset and the headset I dreamt a lot!
Studying the service manual, I found that I have audio output on the microphone RJ45. The only problem is that I must put a dumb 3.5 mm jack into the external speaker to mute the radio and have the audio only on the handset. But this is not a real problem, right?

About the title, well, I was home alone today!

I let you with the pictures and feel free to ask for details!

73 de Adrian, YO3HJV