Sunday, September 23, 2007
My SB-201 has stopped working twice since I've had it. Essentially the the transmit/receive relay would stop working.
Greg suggested that I clean the contacts with a piece of paper. That worked, but about 6-8 hours of operation later the same thing happened. Clean the contacts again, good to go.
Now, I REALLY like the amp. It gets all sorts of "very clean signal, very nice sound" comments on CW. But I really couldn't trust it for contesting. Besides, it gets pretty warm when "doing" RTTY. Plus Greg blew his up doing RTTY.
For the short term I put my AL-80a into service. It it a bit more modern than the SB-201 and runs a bit more power. However it too has its "issues." For some reason it doesn't want to tune on 80m. But I digress.
So... I wanted to get an AL-600S, light-weight, solid-state 600W amp for the California QSO Party. But Ameritron has back ordered them until forever...
The AL-80a weighs a ton, so I ain't taking it on the road. The SB-201 weighs a lot, but not enough to totally preclude taking it on the road.
The solution? Fix the SB-201. So I ordered a new relay from Harbaugh (sp?). It arrived on Friday.
Today I tore into the amp. Now I am not a "tear into your equipment and replace critical parts" sort of guy... But with help from my good friend Bill (who was a ham 'once upon a time' but let his license lapse. That hasn't stopped him from building a KX-1... Just got to get him to take the darn test...) we got the relay out, and the new one in.
We lugged it down stairs and tried it out. It worked for a minute or two then stopped. After some thrashing around we discovered that the Amp Keyer had died. Fortunately, due to mis-placing the Amp Keyer a couple of weeks ago, I just happened to have a brand new spare, just sitting in the box ready to go.
Wired everything back up again, and lo and behold... The amp works swell.
Made a quick QSO with Bob, W7AYN who gave me yet another "nice and clean signal through the amp" report.
VICTORY!
Greg suggested that I clean the contacts with a piece of paper. That worked, but about 6-8 hours of operation later the same thing happened. Clean the contacts again, good to go.
Now, I REALLY like the amp. It gets all sorts of "very clean signal, very nice sound" comments on CW. But I really couldn't trust it for contesting. Besides, it gets pretty warm when "doing" RTTY. Plus Greg blew his up doing RTTY.
For the short term I put my AL-80a into service. It it a bit more modern than the SB-201 and runs a bit more power. However it too has its "issues." For some reason it doesn't want to tune on 80m. But I digress.
So... I wanted to get an AL-600S, light-weight, solid-state 600W amp for the California QSO Party. But Ameritron has back ordered them until forever...
The AL-80a weighs a ton, so I ain't taking it on the road. The SB-201 weighs a lot, but not enough to totally preclude taking it on the road.
The solution? Fix the SB-201. So I ordered a new relay from Harbaugh (sp?). It arrived on Friday.
Today I tore into the amp. Now I am not a "tear into your equipment and replace critical parts" sort of guy... But with help from my good friend Bill (who was a ham 'once upon a time' but let his license lapse. That hasn't stopped him from building a KX-1... Just got to get him to take the darn test...) we got the relay out, and the new one in.
We lugged it down stairs and tried it out. It worked for a minute or two then stopped. After some thrashing around we discovered that the Amp Keyer had died. Fortunately, due to mis-placing the Amp Keyer a couple of weeks ago, I just happened to have a brand new spare, just sitting in the box ready to go.
Wired everything back up again, and lo and behold... The amp works swell.
Made a quick QSO with Bob, W7AYN who gave me yet another "nice and clean signal through the amp" report.
VICTORY!
