Now that VK is back working after a slight outage...and I've had a chance to study my exams...I figure I'd give you guys a bit of an update.
Last weekend I got more serious about finishing looking through the tech questions; even though I was scoring high 30's; and I'm now scoring usually perfect or a 34. So I decided to start doing the general questions...I figured I had a little more than a week and I might stand a chance of passing it.
Well, two evenings later I had apparently gone through the entire general question pool. I took my first test after looking at 30% of the questions, passed with a 29. Finished the question pools, next test was a 34. I haven't aced a general...but I'm consistently scoring 33 or 34 right.
The Kenwood 7400a showed up from kind soul who sent it to me; he also sent the mounting bracket for the 7950. So, I've got two mobile/base 2M rigs to get tone boards for. I've already found a couple of encoders I'm looking at...mostly this one that seems to be based on a PIC chip that has a display and the ability to flip through tones...rather than the com-spec one that doesn't.
https://www.tindie.com/products/isp5...lay-47-tones-/
The guy also sent me a CW key and a code practice oscillator unit. I adjusted the key so it felt great and threw some new caps in that old tubed piece of equipment and it works well...very slow on warm-up due to series filaments on no power transformer...but it's not a huge shock hazard and...well..it produces a tone. So, soon as I get exams out of the way, I can start focusing on learning CW.
I got pictures of everything too:
http://imgur.com/a/sAYow
The exam is the 31st...7pm. 4 more days!