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Amp?

little joe

Guest
Feb 8, 2009
114
7
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california
on my radio the am is turned down to 1 1/2 watts, on the side band it's at it's factory watts 12, my ? is does the sideband need to be turned down to run the amp properly,it's a shooting star 225+ thanks.....:LOL:
 

nope , you are fine . you may not get every clean watt that 225 can do .... but it should still do enough that the difference will only be noticed on a meter .
 
PERFECT!! Leave it where it is set it will be nice and clean sounding and not splattering accross the entire band let alone the fact that the amplifier will run smoothe and be reliable running it at that input power and the extra mess and beating and power you would get from upping the input nobody would ever see or notice anyways otherthan the mess it causes on the air and death of the amplifer for no reason ;)
 
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thanks for the info.. now i also have a cobra 142gtl, the am is at 5 watts, i was talking on it the other day and my buddy told me, it sounded like it was over modulating, he said you need to turn down the wattage to run it with the amp, so if i just turn the wattage down to 1 1/2 on the vr-6 would that do the trick, i tried that once before, and my needle would go backwards, when i keyed up, so maybe there's more to it than just that.. thanks for the reply's.....
 
little joe, it doesn't work that way.
In the CB, both the radio's driver and the final stages are being modulated with audio.
If you turn down the power, the same audio is still trying to drive those stages, so they become overdriven from being turned down.
The amplifier design may not be good enough to handle both modes cleanly.
And there may be RF feedback getting into the mike as well causing poor audio.
What happen's is your trying to use equipment for which you know nothing about, in the technical sense.
The driving radio and the amplifier has to be matched for power drive requirements as well as operating parameters.
I don't know what you actually have but I can tell you absolute, they have to be pretty close to work proper, legal or illegal as it may be.
Good luck..
 
thanks

KM3F.. i think i get the jist of what you said on this thread, the amp came with a uniden washington which it was matched to by previous owner, works great, the 142gtl however, worked on ssb fine, but the am was a different story....I now understand how it works.. thank you for your time and knowledge....





73's central coast of cali.......
 
While were on the subject, check the SWRs between the radio and the amp.........."They" used to make a drop resistor the went between the two but "they" wanted a lot of money.....


.......what I have done before, is tweak the radio out as I usually would and add a bunch of drop resistors to the amp's "in" coax jack. Make sure you use carbon composition resistors and try to have it come out with about a fifty ohm load for the radio. Anywhere between 45-75 ohms should work just fine.(Ham rigs should be able to handle 300 ohms but will reduce power, 200 ohms should set of a CB's SWR warnings.) As a good habit, I like to aways do things in 1/4, it save a lot of looking for notes, so, whatever the input is it would always come out to 1/4 of that.

Just look for Voltage Divider circuits, it's usually easier than making a mess of the stuff that you ain't broked'n yet. (Kris's original instructions recommended the SHORTEST POSSIBLE wire between the radio and amp.)
 
rather than change the radios output impedance so it only works with that one amp . why not fix the amps input impedance so it will work with any 50 ohm output radio ?
 

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