Bird 43 peak upgrade kit help.

[The20poundhammer]

The 9v in my Birds last months. I do find the Energizer Ultimate Lithium last lots longer than any others.

 

[groundwire]

Those 9 V batteries in my two Bird Wattmeters go down fast. Isn't there a kit to convert the 9 V to use a transformer

I asked that question awhile ago and the answers i got is no. Apparently the bird pep kit does some weird positive negative thing with the two batteries so one wall wart wont work. You would have to use two wall warts, one for each battery.

 

[999]

I installed a cap that I found on Ebay for my switches that mounts in one of the side element holes and it works great. It took me about 10 minutes to install it and I didn't have to drill any holes in the case.

Bird 43 Thruline Peak PEP WattMeter Element Kit 2x 5x Multiplier Gray Cap New | eBay

Why spend more money and get less????. all you need is here, and more.

www.ebay.com

 

[Lkaskel]

Screw it, I bought 2 new bird slugs too. My rational is its worthless without them, and im single so no one to bitch at me.

What were you thinking? You spent money on that crap and have not fixed the sink yet? Sorry buddy, I couldn't resist......

 

[nomadradio]

The Bird peak adapter uses two batteries because of the primitive early-1970s opamp chip it uses. All true peak adapters have some kind of current amplifier in them. The Bird's 709 chip requires both positive and negative power sources. Newer op-amp chips can be powered from a single power supply. Every aftermarket adapter I know about requires only one battery. You can use a wall wart in place of a battery for those adapters, but we had trouble with RF leaking into the adapter and disrupting the reading. A battery turns out to be a much smaller and less effective antenna for picking up stray RF, especially from an amplifier with the cover removed. Just the stray RF riding on the outside of your antenna coax can leak through a wall-wart connection into the peak adapter. YMMV.

73

 

[SIX-SHOOTER]

So looking at those specs it looks like you are basically turning your Bird into a Dosy . AVG is where its at.

A Dosy just swings all over the place & changes hourly & daily. A properly calibrated wattmeter with the PEP Function is far beyond what a Dosy can or will ever be. They don't have a Peak Reading Circuit so it can't read Peak Output Power. Just because a wattmeter has a Peak Reading switch does not make it actually read Peak Power. I don't know of any amplifier company that sells their amplifiers based upon Average output power.

 

[KneeBiter]

A Dosy just swings all over the place & changes hourly & daily. A properly calibrated wattmeter with the PEP Function is far beyond what a Dosy can or will ever be. They don't have a Peak Reading Circuit so it can't read Peak Output Power. Just because a wattmeter has a Peak Reading switch does not make it actually read Peak Power. I don't know of any amplifier company that sells their amplifiers based upon Average output power.

I totally understand that. We are talking CB and HAM radio. Everything is pretty relative. Unless you spend big money on calibrated lab equipment we are talking 5% 10% and sometimes 20% accuracy. For some reason some radio operators love Swing. I have had amps that swing backwards on avg yet swing way forward on PEP reading. The person on the other end always reports back with backwards swing. If you are getting say 300 watts out on avg and the person you are talking to is getting say s7 from you when you switch that meter to PEP and start reading say 600 or 700 watts PEP that person on the other end is still getting you at s7. It's not a perfect world and radio is even less.

 

[SIX-SHOOTER]

I totally understand that. We are talking CB and HAM radio. Everything is pretty relative. Unless you spend big money on calibrated lab equipment we are talking 5% 10% and sometimes 20% accuracy. For some reason some radio operators love Swing. I have had amps that swing backwards on avg yet swing way forward on PEP reading. The person on the other end always reports back with backwards swing. If you are getting say 300 watts out on avg and the person you are talking to is getting say s7 from you when you switch that meter to PEP and start reading say 600 or 700 watts PEP that person on the other end is still getting you at s7. It's not a perfect world and radio is even less.

Every piece of gear I own was sold using PEAK Reading numbers so I ONLY use PEAK/PEP reading meters on SSB. I have never had an issue with any of my gear swinging Backwards other than a POS over tuned CB in the 70's maybe. I only use Amateur Radio Gear now other than my GMRS Radios & they don't swing since they are just FM radios. I will never use the Average setting on any of my wattmeters but it's OK if that's what you do with yours. It's Freedom of Choice so enjoy it while we still have at least a little bit of it.

 

[groundwire]

On the bird 43 the avg reading is not accurate with a modulated AM waveform, period. Straight from bird manufacturing: "The model 43 is not the best choice to measure AM modulated signals. It will not measure the average power of this waveform accurately due to the fact that the peak to average power ratio of this signal is not zero". You need to use pep to accurately measure an am modulated signal. Cb'ers and their insistence on avg, lol