© Christoph Petermann DF9CY 2007
Last Revision: 25 December 2007
Intention
In December 2007 I got an ancient Sommerkamp FT 250 shortwave transceiver. I must say it looks like new. The transceiver needs a separate power supply. My FT 250 has a power supply made by last owner. The transceiver has been used as driver for UHF transverters and indeed the pre-owner made a number of moonbounce contacts on 432 MHz with it.
This Sommerkamp FT 250 (which is a different label of the YAESU FT 200) came to the market around 1969. It has the pre-WARC bands (80/40/20/15/10m) without the 160m band. The 10m band is divided into 4 segments of 500 kHz width. Power output is around 100W.
The receiver is working and I can hear a -140 dBm signal from a generator on 7 MHz easily. I have no idea on the large signal performance yet, but as I can read from some publications, it is not too bad. Even it seems to be quite good compared with todays' radios. The VFO is astonishingly stable. After 30 minutes of warming up the receive frequency moved only a few Hz over the next hour.
I have given this transceiver to a friend now to allow him to become QRV again and who is a fan of old radios.
Images
Diagrams
Circuit diagrams of the Sommerkamp FT 250 are available in the internet. You should search a little bit and I am sure you will find the handbook and the circuit diagrams as PDF file in a very good quality for free.