Swing Kit

It is simple, one capacitor and one resistor in parallel.

What happens is the resistor lowers the voltage to the emitter of the driver/collector of the final, when you modulate the radio, the cap by passes the resistor (remember this is audio, dc doesn't pass a cap) and adds voltage to the emitter of the driver/collector of the final.

Hope that makes sense, I'm not making much tonight, I've got a very nasty cold.

By the way. for those who want to lower the wattage of their radios for a linear, you can omit the cap just put in the resistor, (have the radio tuned for the max before you put the resistor in), then you have lower power for the amp. You don't have to tune the radio to the amp.

There are a couple other ways that this can work by the way, I was one who had a nice business making potted swing kits that were adjustable a while back, someone bought one, cracked it open and figured it out, no biggie, it was a PIA and the profit wasn't great. However it worked on every radio I installed it on and you could adjust the power and adjust the swing.

 

The swing kit is supposed to drop the carrier, while keeping the modulation, if not increasing it.

The idea behind it is it makes your radio "sound" louder, and also makes it able to not overdrive an amplifier that otherwise requires a lower input carrier than 4 watts.

However most swing kits surpass the 1:4 carrier to modulation ratio, and thus cause issues.

And yes as pointed out above, it's a cap and a resistor. On Cobra 29's the jumper JP36 is removed and the swing kit is installed there. On Cobra 25's it's JP6.

It's also a good way to lighten your wallet. While most of them cost maybe $10, the reality is you can buy the parts for less than $5 at RadioShack.

Ooopsie...I just gave away one of the golden screwdriver hacknicians magic tricks.

 

Yes it is a big rip off, it is less than $1 in parts, most of the time you can buy in bulk at 50 cents worth of parts and I've seen some places charge $20 to install it.

 

Bobs Top Gun Modulator is a fancy name for a swing kit which distorts the waveform and decreases your range.

 

I would never goes as far as buying anything just to build a simple splatter kit I've always used caps and resistors that I salvaged from old TV,s and never had any issues.
BTW older TV,s actually seem to have a decent quality of components in them and that's all I use just for swing kits, nothing more.