A friend has a Palomar 300 linear amplifier when he plugs it in a recently installed GFI it will trip it so amp will not get power and work. The amplifier has been taken to my home and plugged in a regular outlet and no problem. Is the problem the GFI wiring or is amplifier not wired correctly or not working properly?? Thanks
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Amplifier tripping GFI
- Thread starter Jimbo165
- Start date
Does the GFI trip before it gets keyed on an antenna?
Had a friend that would trip a GFI breaker in his house when he used his linear on 80 meters. Changed some ground connections and the problem went away for him.
If it trips as soon as you turn on the power, this suggests one of two things. First, a bypass capacitor in the amplifier chassis can do this if it got damaged by a surge, or if someone replaced with the wrong capacitance value. There should be a disc capacitor from each side of the AC line cord to the amplifier chassis. Leakage current from a capacitor that was damage by a surge, or was replaced with the wrong capacitance value can do this.
Second, a leaky power transformer can do this as well. Unplug the power transformer and try powering the amplifier by itself. Won't run anything but the cooling fan, but if the fault is in the RF chassis, you'll still trip the GFI. And if the transformer is at fault, you'll only trip it with the transformer connected.
And if it only does this when it is keyed and showing RF power, that makes it a RF problem in the GFI. Whole 'nother range of things to try for that.
73
Had a friend that would trip a GFI breaker in his house when he used his linear on 80 meters. Changed some ground connections and the problem went away for him.
If it trips as soon as you turn on the power, this suggests one of two things. First, a bypass capacitor in the amplifier chassis can do this if it got damaged by a surge, or if someone replaced with the wrong capacitance value. There should be a disc capacitor from each side of the AC line cord to the amplifier chassis. Leakage current from a capacitor that was damage by a surge, or was replaced with the wrong capacitance value can do this.
Second, a leaky power transformer can do this as well. Unplug the power transformer and try powering the amplifier by itself. Won't run anything but the cooling fan, but if the fault is in the RF chassis, you'll still trip the GFI. And if the transformer is at fault, you'll only trip it with the transformer connected.
And if it only does this when it is keyed and showing RF power, that makes it a RF problem in the GFI. Whole 'nother range of things to try for that.
73
He probably had a neutral inside the amplifier shared with ground. That'll always trip the GFCI
Yeah if the neutral is bonded to ground in the amp, possibly from reworking the power cable into the amp, that will trip a GFCI instantly.
That's not part of the 300A factory design. Ground and neutral are properly isolated in the RF deck and the external transformer both.
Component failure or improper component substitution top the hit parade for me. Then again, who knows what kind of bonehead rewiring could have been done to it in the last 45 years?
73
Component failure or improper component substitution top the hit parade for me. Then again, who knows what kind of bonehead rewiring could have been done to it in the last 45 years?
73