In November 2021 I bought a Kenwood TS-50S through eBay (shipped from Japan) which funnily enough got to my home the morning I began my drive back from the east coast from visiting family for Thanksgiving.

The rig was in immaculate shape outside, and untouched inside. All hardware, cables, and solder were complete and unmolested. This rig came with all original accessories as it was bought with in Japan originally. It was obvious the unit was treated very well and was from a non-smoking home. This unit came with a very rare mobile "quick mount" that by operating a lever you could secure or remove the TS-50S from it.

After much research, I had a list of things to check and replace/add. The first thing I checked was the battery, which was… well, reading backwards. I had read that a SMT battery holder for a CR2030 battery would fit exactly in the two pads for the original batter, which it did! I was very pleased about that! The next thing I did was to add a TCXO. I bought and installed a SO-2 compatible TCXO from N3BA because the drift while the unit warmed up and stabilized started to get annoying and this completely solved that behavior. Since the band plans back when this radio was manfactured are not the same as today, I removed a diode that limits the TX frequencies to be able to use it on the frequencies I can operate on. This basically makes it a freenabder radio, so you have to be very careful where you are sitting when you hit TX – it will transmit.

I call it the little cousin of my Kenwood TS-850S.

I did go about doing a full recap on this unit as I had found some capacitors starting to leak and to attempt to fix an odd issue where some amount of RF in the shack would enable the RIT with an offset causing you to be off frequency partway through the transmission and on RX when you came out of TX. For all intents and purposes, I could not reproduce the issue again after all the capacitors were replaced on it.

Just as I was finishing the recap, a friend bought the unit and is now inside a portable setup they use for HF based on a hare-brained idea I had a while back. I missed it so much I broke down and bought another one on eBay from Japan.