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Enough of the 'franken' stuff. All solid-state TS-830, anyone?

nomadradio

Analog Retentive
Apr 3, 2005
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Louisville, KY
www.nomadradio.com
Recently had a bad experience with a Kenwod TS-830. One of my all-time favorite radios, especially for receiver performance.

When it arrived the plate choke and other small parts were burned up in the final compartment. I blamed this on the chinese 6146B final tubes that were in it. Replaced all the burned stuff, and it just wouldn't tune up right. Before I could exercise better judgement, POP-CRACK!. Blue flashes from the final compartment, most of the same stuff blown out as before. Puked one of the NOS tubes I had put in. The right ones, made by ECG (Sylvania contract).

No, I did not try to use GE-made 6146W tubes.

Found a detached wire on the band switch. Replaced all the burned stuff, and POP-CRACK!

Again.

Threw in the towel after that. Got me to wondering. Could I cram a 50-Volt MOSFET final into this thing? NXP claims 100 Watts for the MRF101 part.

The drive level feeding into the 12BY7A driver tube is probably close to what that transistor needs for drive power. Removing the power transformer might leave room for a 12-Volt switchmode brick to power the solid-state stuff, and a 50-Volt brick on top of it for the final.

Cramming the low-pass filter into the final compartment with the one-transistor amplifier might be a challenge.

Should be able to "borrow" a section from the band selector to activate the correct LP filter relay for each band, especially if the section for the driver tube is no longer needed for that purpose.

Seems like a good time to ask around and see if anyone else has tried this sort of diabolical trick. I haven't heard of it.

So far this is an idea that's not quite even half-defrosted let alone half-baked. But if someone else has done this it would save a lot of headaches and time to copy their work rather than reinvent the wheel on this radio.

Anyone?

73
 
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