Follow-Up Of The Magnum Maverick A24 Radio by Bob FBack in the August issue I did an article on the new Magnum Maverick A34 10-meter radio. As mention in that article the radio submitted for review was a pre-production unit. Finally Magnum received 20 production radios and I was able to convince them to send one in. This time it arrived complete in a very colorful display box. Once I removed the radio from the box, I noticed the meter is a new style with white and red bars. This makes it easier to see the red needle against the white, but the numbers are smaller than the old style meter. It really isn't an issue though, while driving neither meter is readable. The front panel looks very nice and is well marked and laid out. The echo delay control has a center detent for the most popular echo setting. They did correct the SWR antenna warning light as mentioned in the August issue. The SWR warning LED has a switch on the rear panel incase you wish to turn it off. With a 2:1 SWR the lamp stayed off during a dead key, but flashed with the modulation. At a 3:1 the LED came on solid. This is a good feature, because your antenna match may be way off on a different band and this would warn you not to use these frequencies until the antenna system is set to cover that band.
Although the PC Board has all the trimmers marked, there are a few whose functions aren't obvious. Below is a list of the trimmer potentiometer adjustments.
The power on FM is 40 Watts. The AM low power is 1 Watt swinging to 18 Watts peak and is adjustable up to 10 Watts swinging up to 40 Watts peak. The low power setting can be set from 0 to 5 watts internally. The transmission audio quality is very good and the adjustable talkback is excellent. On air reports were very favorable, and this is with the stock mic. The receiver audio quality is very good as well. The tone is full and clear, even better than the Magnum Delta Force. The sensitivity is good too. The audio volume is capable of driving you out of your vehicle with the internal speaker. The speaker is the same one used in the Delta Force radio. I did encounter a problem with the echo board. The radio tested fine on the dummy load, but once connected to the base antenna, there was a mic key click echo every time the mic was keys with the echo volume set at mid level. There was minor RF feedback present on the transmitted signal as well as in the talkback. This was corrected by the addition of a 390pf capacitor to the echo volume signal to ground on the echo board. This was so minute it may not happen with all or many antennas. Magnum says they are looking into it, surely any future radios will have a fix or this fix in them (UPDATE: See Maverick A24 Technical Bulletin in February 2002 issue). Magnum has a resistor change for customers that would like to make the echo more like a turbo echo rather than a reverb type echo. This involves changing R618 a 33K Ohm resistor with a larger value up to 75K Ohms. To get the sound you want slightly increase the value until you reach the desired effect. In summary, this is a very good AM/FM 10-meter radio. It will go head-to-head with the Connex 3300HP and General Lee radios. For the price of a 3300HP, you get a 40 Watt peak radio with antenna warning, adjustable all mode talkback, adjustable power, separate echo ON/Off switch, 40 Watt FM, a florescent replacement front panel and other conveniences over and above what the other radios offer. Bob F Back To Cover Page |
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