Recent content by Captain Kilowatt

In the low 70's here today. Beautiful day.....finally. It was a good day to rake the lawn and generally clean up in prep for spring/summer. Jim......the difference in conductivity of the different metals might be measurable but will never be noticed. The same applies with the overall difference...

You want to replace a 9 volt battery with a 3 volt battery? First you would need to stack three of them and second, make 100% sure that there is no charging current going to the batteries as they are NOT rechargeable, and lastly, how much current does the backup draw? Since the coin cells are...

I have been saying that for years and years. When the new shack-in-a-box radios came out with audio processing everyone was WOW!!. The processor in my new at the time FT-857 could not hold a candle to the processor in my Kenwood TS-820S which uses RF processing. People would not believe me since...

I am not surprised about the SWR at 160 MHz. Pretty sure that long (relatively speaking) ground wire tying the connector to the load is the reason for that. That certainly adds capacitance to the system. If the connector was mounted on metal I bet the SWR would be better.

Corona? Perhaps a Presidente. Off to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic for a week on March 4. I'll have a couple for you.

Well today the thermometer FINALLY rose above the freezing point for the first time in over a month. Usually we get some stretches of cold followed by a slight warming trend where it gets above freezing for a few days and then it repeats. The river behind the house has been frozen over for...

Are you sure about that? What did I miss? Since when did more voltage mean less current draw? That only applies if you wish power consumption to remain constant but that does not happen in a simple fixed resistance case.

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...