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  1. Captain Kilowatt

    20 Meter "Frankenstick" Antenna

    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...
  2. Captain Kilowatt

    Kenwood Battery Question

    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...
  3. Captain Kilowatt

    Compressor

    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...
  4. Captain Kilowatt

    cheap 250 watt dummy load

    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.
  5. Captain Kilowatt

    How about it?

    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.
  6. Captain Kilowatt

    How about it?

    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...
  7. Captain Kilowatt

    Cereal motors and parallel universes part deux

    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.
  8. Captain Kilowatt

    Problem with AL-80B

    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...
  9. Captain Kilowatt

    Problem with AL-80B

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

    Problem with AL-80B

    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.
  11. Captain Kilowatt

    Any channel plan for FM?

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

    Yaesu FT-101E repair

    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...
  13. Captain Kilowatt

    What good 10 meter amps with SSB Biasing are ones to look for?

    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.
  14. Captain Kilowatt

    6 Meters is OPEN

    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.
  15. Captain Kilowatt

    Var. RMS?

    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...
  16. Captain Kilowatt

    New version Icom IC-7300 MK2

    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...
  17. Captain Kilowatt

    ALC yes or no

    Sounds more like a misguided tech to me.
  18. Captain Kilowatt

    Why 160m Rarely Appears in Band-Condition Charts

    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.
  19. Captain Kilowatt

    FCC has removed all the call sign look up pages

    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.
  20. Captain Kilowatt

    Interesting Antenna Height Question...

    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.