Seeing there is a 70cm FT8 competition on tonight I sort of threw kit together to see if it even worked. So, one big wheel (‘big’ on 70cms is hardly big!) and a transverter plugged together and I managed a few decodes. Good, but…
It fell apart once I tried to answer a CQ. The caller was high on the waterfall and the amount of drift the blessed transverter managed after just one transmit cycle moved the received signal right off the right hand side. So that failed.
I did try to answer one more station that was in the middle of the waterfall but the same happened, this time still on the waterfall but no amount of chasing it across the screen yielded a decode. Fail again.
Apologies to those two stations, this transverter is clearly useless for digital modes but I thought it worth a try. A tad disappointing. I managed all of 14 miles – I think the transverter manages 10 watts. I can do 17 miles to the local 70cm repeater on a handheld and supplied short antenna on 5 watts FM.