Ten Tec Today…

If you have been on the internet 5 minutes, you know how I have a love affair with Ten Tec amateur radio equipment. It is a multifaceted interest for me with things like, where they were made(Tennessee), the mode Jack focused on (CW), the reason this was where they put all their engineering effort it seemed as well as the physical appearance or aesthetic if the radios, I just love everything about the brand and equipment. Recently though, the brand has changed ownership and one of the founders (Jack Burchfield K4JU/SK) left this earth and by extension, forever ending the Ten Tec of old… the name does live on with Mr Dishop of Dishtronics, but it is just the name at this point and nothing more from what I can tell.

What has become one of my activities at hamfests has been to go on a scavenger hunt for old Ten Tec radios to see how many are still being traded on the second hand market. Like the Triton above, which is a wonderful little radio if you are not hung up on having the WARC bands...

So what follows is all the Ten Tec equipment I could find at the Dalton Georgia Hamfest that me and a friend (Roger - KG4WHI) attended. I hope you enjoy seeing these old machines as much as I did, knowing that there is still people out there using these wonderful radios.

I don’t know why, but I have always like the Scout radios. It really isn’t that convenient of a radio to be honest about it, but if you have a band or maybe two that you linger on regularly then this would be a great radio for that. I know people that don’t even venture off of a single frequency, much less than a different band… This one was bundled with 7 band modules and a battery and stuff in the hardcase for 9 bills…

The amplifier here (the Titan) is a legal limit amp from the right period to find my station aesthetic, but it runs tubes and some of these machines have tubes that are getting harder and harder to get, some amps are to the point of needing to be retrofitted with a different set of tubes as the originals are no longer available. I don’t know if the Titan falls into the latter category yet, but it is possible. The Hercules is a solid state, lower power version of the Titan and even it is getting long in the tooth at this point. A lot of the high power RF transistors from that period are no longer available now, this would mean a complete retrofit of the power amplifier section again…but then again, it would match my Omni 6+ station aesthetic… lol

Something that struck me as odd was the sheer number of Omni A radios that I saw this time. There is usually one floating around but three at one time is a lot! The one above was paired with a newer generation power supply that is intended for the Paragon, Omni 5 & 6 era radios but would probably work fine if needed.

Another thing I noticed on this trip was that we found all three of the later generation (80’s) rigs. We found a Paragon, a couple of Omni 5 rigs and a Omni 6 as well. It is neat to see the difference between each model and how they evolved over time.

Look at all that Ten Tec goodness on this truck! A Paragon as well as an Omni 6 and on top of that, the automatic antenna tuner (they called it an antenna coupler) as well as the matching speaker power supply. This is what I strived to own for years and it took me a while to assembly my station from different places but I now have the Omni 6+, Automatic Antenna Coupler and Speaker Power Supply station. Hence the need for the Hercules… but I digress… Anyway, what a day of scavenger hunting Ten Tec radios at a local hamfest! Did you notice something else in the photos that caught your eye if you are not into these old radios like I am?

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