Recent content by Captain Kilowatt

Eimac used regular solder in the earlier runs of the 3-500 and continued for years. After numerous failures, they switched to a silver based solder with higher melting point. The solder would literally melt out of the filament pins on the tube. A change in sockets did NOT resolve the problem...

Better check those melting points again. 60/40 solder is fully a liquid at 375 degrees F. Aluminum will melt at 1200F.

Check for filament voltage at the socket. You should see about 5.0 volts. If it is present, look carefully at the tube filament pins. If the tube has been run hot, solder has been known to melt and run out of the pins making an open circuit.

I'm guessing he was referring to a frequency within the regular 40 channels.

I just restored it. I will not put up with people deleting their posts like that, ESPECIALLY since it was the start of a topic and also especially for the reason he claimed......nobody interested. He posted and only waited a few hours and his original post was at 3am. WTF did he expect? As Jeff...

No. It will help reduce harmonics, but that is all. It will do NOTHING to reduce in-band IMD or just plain distortion of the signal caused by the hard switching of the transistors in class C.

Nice deal. I would be interested in seeing the assembly diagram of that antenna. I have a homemade six element OWA on a similar length boom that I built myself many years ago. I have no idea what the actual gain is but it works really well and has quite a sharp pattern.

The amp could not produce full peak power on the ten amp supply. It was being starved for current. Running it off the 20 amp supply allowed it to pull full peak current, whereas the ten amp supply would only allow a much lower power. The amp neither knows nor cares whether that power is average...

Don't run the RF gain wide open. Switch in some attenuation. As long as the signal is above the noise floor. Cutting back on the gain will not affect signal quality but will reduce overload and IMD. At times I switch in 10dB of attenuation and see IMD disappear or greatly reduced, much more than...

Sounds more like a misguided tech to me.

Well 160m is not HF. It is actually MW, medium wave, and is much more like the AM broadcast band than it is like any HF band. It starts only 95 kilohertz above the AM band.

qrz.com gets their callsign info directly from the FCC for US amateurs. Unless the data is still available for uploading to qrz, even that option will be affected.

Kind of, but not completely. You mentioned take off angle changing with height but you also mentioned where gain comes from. I simply clarified about the reflected signal combining with the incident signal to gain an extra 5-8 dB. Just more info, that's all.

DX Man is probably talking about the extra 5 to 8 dB gain a horizontal antenna can achieve from what is called ground reflection gain. The take-off angle changes with height. The angle that the signal strikes the ground and is reflected, combines with the incident wave signal and actually adds...

Florida RF Labs has some nice attenuators. Henry Radio as well. I have picked up several off Ebay. I have a 100 watt 10 dB pad to limit drive to a solidstate amplifier. 50 watt 3 dB. attenuator 100 watt 1.0 dB attenuator The above require a heatsink to be mounted on. Below is a coaxial...