I posted this privately to someone, but thought perhaps it might work better
to post it here, even if I do feel like a complete newbie doing so..

Ok, being as I've never hooked up my own power supply before--when I was
active before it was just on an HT.. I thought I knew what I was doing, but
it's not working the way I'd expected. the kenwood 707a came in yesterday,
and the power supply today. So now the challenge of connecting the two..

I got a radio shack power supply, 13.8vdc as recommended by the manual, 15
amps. The terminals on the front of it look kind of like knobs on a radio or
something, they have big plastic covers that you use to screw and unscrew
them. When unscrewed, I managed to reach down and feel the actual screw, and
each screw has a hole in it that goes all the way from the top of the screw
to the bottom. the knobs have holes in them too, going front the back.

As far as the radio DC cable, each has what feel like several very small
bare wires at the end, but the wires have been twisted together and sawtered
at the end, so it's more like a single wire at the end of each, positive and
negative. they are labeled, so I know which is which, and I know which
terminal is which on the power supply. Of course, everything is unplugged as
I'm trying to connect them.

So, the first thing I tried was sticking the wires from the radio into the
holes on the knobs. this didn't work, because rescrewing the knobs still
didn't hold the wires in place. Next I tried wrapping the wires around the
correct terminal, around the screw itself then screwing on the knobs. this
sort of worked, but as it started to clamp down, the knob part started
pushing the wires away rather than holding them in place. Is there a certain
trick to this? Should I be feeding the wire into the middle of the screw
where there's a hole first, then wrapping it? I just don't want to
experiment too much because I don't want to damage the cable. On the other
hand, I sure don't want to do it wrong and create a worse problem. I'm
looking into getting some eyes over here, but finding someone with knowledge
of these things is far from easy, especially when I can't get on the air
anywhere except echolink, and I'm not sure which repeaters are close to me
that also have echolink access.
thanks!
--
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