For all you hams who are boaters...
 

Short Wave Sportfishing wrote in
:

I used to use the KWM-2A all the time - on the sly - on the ham bands
when things were slow in 'Nam. :)

I was the only ham radio operator on USS Everglades for my tour. Call
was WB4THE at the time. My ham radio was the crew's telephone home with
an old friend of mine, Cliff, K4OKD, back on James Island in Charleston.
He ran phone patches for lots of sailors whos ships were at sea out of
our port. His wall was covered with ships' plaques he collected and
letters of thanks from greatful crews.

The comm officers hated me. My captain, a full 4-striper who made rear
admiral, used to terrify the Ensigns and JGs by going into Radio and
saying, "I want to talk to Charleston.", as we approached the Med or some
Caribbean islands. Of course, they'd have to tell him that wasn't
possible in these conditions, to which my captain would reply, "That's
bull****! I've been talking to my wife on a phone patch from ET1
Butler's little Heathkit radio back in the cal lab for the last
hour!"....(c; Yep, comm officers hated me. With CRUDESFLOT6, our
admiral and my captain using my phone patch to call the wife, my ham
radio station was quite secure in its position of the pecking order. My
own EMO, a little weasle of a CWO2 Navy stuck us with, was always trying
to sabotage WB4THE/MM2. One time, he made the mistake of telling
CRUDESFLOT6 what a terrible security risk it was. He never pulled that
stunt, again, and was told the station would be still there after his
transfer to the Aleutians to run some remote walkie talkie....(c;


They just don't make them like they used to.


Thank God for that! I'm kinda partial to my FT-990/FT-900/Tentec
modified 650W (OUTPUT) Hercules II 12V linear toys, now. It only draws
120A at full power...(c;

Before I became an internet addict, my 1973 Mercedes 220D, the finest, NO
RF NOISE, diesel mobile on the planet sported a trunk remoted Yaesu FT-
900 next to the big Tentec linear and 2 330AH golf cart monsters in the
trunk. The linear and radio control heads were on a gooseneck stalk
conveniently located right under your hand next to the steering wheel.
Under the dash, fed by an old Win 3.1 laptop was a Kantronics KAM multi-
mode TNC for packet, RTTY, etc., with full crossband, MOBILE, high
powered VHF-HF node. Antenna was a home brewed 15' tall Texas Bugcatcher
with Henry Allen's biggest monster coil 3' off the trailer hitch military
insulator. 4' of stainless rod sat atop the big coil ending in an 8-
spoke, 18" diameter capacitor hat made of stainless welding rods welded
to two stainless flatwashers. Atop the capacitor hat was a cut-down
stainless CB whip up to around 15'. As 20M mobile was my favorite band,
the big coil shorting strap for this band would short out the entire coil
and the top whip was trimmed for 1:1 with no coils at 14.200 Mhz. At the
band edges it was only 1.3:1 and the big linear loved it, dearly.

To match the 12.8ohm base impedance, a large Amidon toroid from the
Wireman's HF balun kit was wound with 10 turns of #10 bare copper wire
over several layers of fiberglass insulation wrapped around the core. At
the ends and and at the outside of each turn, was soldered a banana jack
that was exposed on the outside of the plastic budbox it was all mounted
in to keep it out of the weather. One end of the autotransformer was
hard grounded to the Mercedes' frame directly under the whip with a heavy
strap. The shield of the feedline coax was also soldered to the strap.
The center conductor of the feedline had a big banana plug and was,
normally, plugged into the high end tap of the 10 turn coil (except on
10M where it was plugged into turn 6). A heavy strap to a big lug under
the whip's mount was the "tap" that plugged into turn 3 (20-10M) or 4
(40-80M) on the broadband autotransformer at the feedpoint. I melted a
couple of banana plugs until I found one that didn't mind conducting so
much current at such a low Z point...(c; The coil was always too hot to
touch and had to be isolated so it didn't touch the plastic box or it
would melt through it.

NOONE had more field strength from any mobile, or any more signal at a
remote point, running the same input power. I still have it, stored.

For 160 Meter mobile operation, a second autotransformer was wound with
22 turns tapped at 8 turns to match the base impedance at that band. A
second Henry Allen coil, about 40T of #14? was added atop the big monster
coil to tune it. Using the tap on the big coil, I could tune it all the
way across 1.8-2.0 easily, but its bandwidth was only about 12 Khz to the
2:1 SWR points, nearly like a cavity!

For 10M and 12M operation, the capacitor hat and 4' stainless rod above
the big coil quick disconnected and you put the CB whip on top of the big
coil. This tuned 10M with about 2 T of big coil unshorted and 12M with
2.5T unshorted, still making a big signal in Asia.

This installation had a big problem.....CORONA....especially on 160M and
80M. The ends of the capacitor hat rods were bent into a large hook and
they STILL blazed away, even in sunlight, as did the top of the CB whip.
Adding a big static ball to the CB whip top didn't help reduce the corona
spraying off it much at all. Estimating the length of the visible corona
and the humidity at measurement time, we estimated I was creating around
180 to 250KV at the top with a 650W carrier. "HEY, MISTER! YOUR ANTENNA
IS ON FIRE!!", they'd shout to me driving down the road....(c; The old
Mercedes electrical system is resonant on the upper end of 75M, too. AS
you talked to someone on 75M phone, all the dashlights would glow
brightly following your voice. On 75 and 160M phone, you could also hear
what anyone was saying into the microphone OUTSIDE the car because you
could hear the donald duck SSB IN THE CORONA at the top of the beast!

Great fun at a hamfest. I had custom-made warning signs: DANGER RF
RADIATION HAZARD - EVEN WHEN CAR IS UNOCCUPIED all around the big coil
because we used to leave the 20M packet crossband node running to 2 meter
packet from a 50W 2M FM rig to connect 2M packet hams to 20M packet hams.
This created storms of 2M packet QSOs wherever the car happened to be,
once the word got around. I used to leave the car on "Network 105" on
14.105 Mhz to the local packet VHF node wherever it was. Inside the
hamfest, I'd run a Tiny 2 little packet VHF TNC with a tiny VHF walkie
and a little Radio Shack LCD word processor that doubled as a dumb
terminal. Running 50mw from your flea market table, you could work Japan
on 20M packet....(c; Of course, some stupids got their fingers singed
out in the parking lot ignoring my warning signs, crossing the no-mans-
zone around the back of the car taped off with those lane markers they
use at the banks. They just HAD to burn themselves to prove me wrong!...
(c; You also got burned if you touched the body of the car (becoming
part of my ground plane array) below 20 meters. The car body was quite a
few hundred volts off ground-ground, especially the lower in frequency
you got. If you stuck your arm out the window and someone whistled on
160 meters, you could feel your fingers buzzing....

I still have it all, except the batteries of course. The antenna is
stored in my shed, the linear and FT-900 are in their boxes inside. I
don't even have an external antenna up at home for the last couple of
years. Who needs ham radio? I got Skype and Echolink.

It was a great ride for many years I spent on the road working gov't
contracts for the Navy....

Remember - POWER is our FRIEND!

For all you hams who are boaters...
 

Short Wave Sportfishing wrote in
:

One of my fishing buds used to work for Victory Lines and ran a
retro-fitted Onasis era 750' tanker on a race track Baltimore to
Caracas to Houston to Baltimore and he had one of those Butternuts
clamped to the maneuvering side rail on the bridge.



One of the hams passing through Charleston from time to time was Larry,
KI7GF, who was one of the masters of SeaLand "Performance", a Dutch-made
950' containership I got the golden tour of. (7 cyl, 38,800hp, ONE
engine, no transmission, ONE BIG HONKIN' SCREW!)

Larry used a Butternut rigged to the top of the bridge with the Yaesu rig
on his desk in the master's stateroom. Worked great and I set him up on
packet/APRS many, many years ago. I've lost track of him, now, but used
to track him on 20M APRS unless he was chatting away on the phone bands.

The first time I was in his stateroom, I had to use the head. When I
came out of the captain's private head, I had an amused look on my face.
He asked me what was so funny. I said, "I'm an old enlisted sailor. Do
you know what they would have done to me if they'd caught me coming out
of the captain's head?!" Then he told me he was enlisted, too, when he
was in the Navy. Too funny....



--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.

For all you hams who are boaters...
 

Short Wave Sportfishing wrote in
:

1,200 hp supercharged MANs

Aren't they those MANs with the connecting rods sticking out through the
block?....(c;

--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.

For all you hams who are boaters...
 

"Calif Bill" wrote in
link.net:

We used a portable radio with the bar antenna on it, that we rotated
the radio to get the best signals from different San Francisco and
Oakland radio stations to find the Golden Gate Bridge entrance to SF
Bay. We never failed to return home, so was a valid system.



Heathkit used to make an RDF little portable receiver with a loopstick
mounted in a rotating housing on top for RDF fixes. Worked great!

--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.

For all you hams who are boaters...
 

"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...

On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 13:05:41 -0400, "Eisboch" wrote:


"Wayne.B" wrote in message
. ..
On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 10:23:25 GMT, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:

THE HORROR, THE HUMANITY!!!

Maybe you could get the turbo option and install a fighting chair with
some outriggers and tuna tower.

The guy two boats over from me has the GB 52' Europa. Twin Cat 3208s -
non
turbo.
It's a 10 kt boat.

How do you guys stand it?

My boat doesn't even plane at 10 knots.



It's hard to explain. Different type of boating. The easy
chuga-chuga-chuga is actually very relaxing.
Things don't happen fast so you can just enjoy the view and ride.

Eisboch

For all you hams who are boaters...
 

"Larry" wrote in message
...
Short Wave Sportfishing wrote in
:

I used to use the KWM-2A all the time - on the sly - on the ham bands
when things were slow in 'Nam. :)

I was the only ham radio operator on USS Everglades for my tour. Call
was WB4THE at the time. My ham radio was the crew's telephone home with
an old friend of mine, Cliff, K4OKD, back on James Island in Charleston.
He ran phone patches for lots of sailors whos ships were at sea out of
our port. His wall was covered with ships' plaques he collected and
letters of thanks from greatful crews.

The comm officers hated me. My captain, a full 4-striper who made rear
admiral, used to terrify the Ensigns and JGs by going into Radio and
saying, "I want to talk to Charleston.", as we approached the Med or some
Caribbean islands. Of course, they'd have to tell him that wasn't
possible in these conditions, to which my captain would reply, "That's
bull****! I've been talking to my wife on a phone patch from ET1
Butler's little Heathkit radio back in the cal lab for the last
hour!"....(c; Yep, comm officers hated me. With CRUDESFLOT6, our
admiral and my captain using my phone patch to call the wife, my ham
radio station was quite secure in its position of the pecking order. My
own EMO, a little weasle of a CWO2 Navy stuck us with, was always trying
to sabotage WB4THE/MM2. One time, he made the mistake of telling
CRUDESFLOT6 what a terrible security risk it was. He never pulled that
stunt, again, and was told the station would be still there after his
transfer to the Aleutians to run some remote walkie talkie....(c;


They just don't make them like they used to.


Thank God for that! I'm kinda partial to my FT-990/FT-900/Tentec
modified 650W (OUTPUT) Hercules II 12V linear toys, now. It only draws
120A at full power...(c;

Before I became an internet addict, my 1973 Mercedes 220D, the finest, NO
RF NOISE, diesel mobile on the planet sported a trunk remoted Yaesu FT-
900 next to the big Tentec linear and 2 330AH golf cart monsters in the
trunk. The linear and radio control heads were on a gooseneck stalk
conveniently located right under your hand next to the steering wheel.
Under the dash, fed by an old Win 3.1 laptop was a Kantronics KAM multi-
mode TNC for packet, RTTY, etc., with full crossband, MOBILE, high
powered VHF-HF node. Antenna was a home brewed 15' tall Texas Bugcatcher
with Henry Allen's biggest monster coil 3' off the trailer hitch military
insulator. 4' of stainless rod sat atop the big coil ending in an 8-
spoke, 18" diameter capacitor hat made of stainless welding rods welded
to two stainless flatwashers. Atop the capacitor hat was a cut-down
stainless CB whip up to around 15'. As 20M mobile was my favorite band,
the big coil shorting strap for this band would short out the entire coil
and the top whip was trimmed for 1:1 with no coils at 14.200 Mhz. At the
band edges it was only 1.3:1 and the big linear loved it, dearly.

To match the 12.8ohm base impedance, a large Amidon toroid from the
Wireman's HF balun kit was wound with 10 turns of #10 bare copper wire
over several layers of fiberglass insulation wrapped around the core. At
the ends and and at the outside of each turn, was soldered a banana jack
that was exposed on the outside of the plastic budbox it was all mounted
in to keep it out of the weather. One end of the autotransformer was
hard grounded to the Mercedes' frame directly under the whip with a heavy
strap. The shield of the feedline coax was also soldered to the strap.
The center conductor of the feedline had a big banana plug and was,
normally, plugged into the high end tap of the 10 turn coil (except on
10M where it was plugged into turn 6). A heavy strap to a big lug under
the whip's mount was the "tap" that plugged into turn 3 (20-10M) or 4
(40-80M) on the broadband autotransformer at the feedpoint. I melted a
couple of banana plugs until I found one that didn't mind conducting so
much current at such a low Z point...(c; The coil was always too hot to
touch and had to be isolated so it didn't touch the plastic box or it
would melt through it.

NOONE had more field strength from any mobile, or any more signal at a
remote point, running the same input power. I still have it, stored.

For 160 Meter mobile operation, a second autotransformer was wound with
22 turns tapped at 8 turns to match the base impedance at that band. A
second Henry Allen coil, about 40T of #14? was added atop the big monster
coil to tune it. Using the tap on the big coil, I could tune it all the
way across 1.8-2.0 easily, but its bandwidth was only about 12 Khz to the
2:1 SWR points, nearly like a cavity!

For 10M and 12M operation, the capacitor hat and 4' stainless rod above
the big coil quick disconnected and you put the CB whip on top of the big
coil. This tuned 10M with about 2 T of big coil unshorted and 12M with
2.5T unshorted, still making a big signal in Asia.

This installation had a big problem.....CORONA....especially on 160M and
80M. The ends of the capacitor hat rods were bent into a large hook and
they STILL blazed away, even in sunlight, as did the top of the CB whip.
Adding a big static ball to the CB whip top didn't help reduce the corona
spraying off it much at all. Estimating the length of the visible corona
and the humidity at measurement time, we estimated I was creating around
180 to 250KV at the top with a 650W carrier. "HEY, MISTER! YOUR ANTENNA
IS ON FIRE!!", they'd shout to me driving down the road....(c; The old
Mercedes electrical system is resonant on the upper end of 75M, too. AS
you talked to someone on 75M phone, all the dashlights would glow
brightly following your voice. On 75 and 160M phone, you could also hear
what anyone was saying into the microphone OUTSIDE the car because you
could hear the donald duck SSB IN THE CORONA at the top of the beast!

Great fun at a hamfest. I had custom-made warning signs: DANGER RF
RADIATION HAZARD - EVEN WHEN CAR IS UNOCCUPIED all around the big coil
because we used to leave the 20M packet crossband node running to 2 meter
packet from a 50W 2M FM rig to connect 2M packet hams to 20M packet hams.
This created storms of 2M packet QSOs wherever the car happened to be,
once the word got around. I used to leave the car on "Network 105" on
14.105 Mhz to the local packet VHF node wherever it was. Inside the
hamfest, I'd run a Tiny 2 little packet VHF TNC with a tiny VHF walkie
and a little Radio Shack LCD word processor that doubled as a dumb
terminal. Running 50mw from your flea market table, you could work Japan
on 20M packet....(c; Of course, some stupids got their fingers singed
out in the parking lot ignoring my warning signs, crossing the no-mans-
zone around the back of the car taped off with those lane markers they
use at the banks. They just HAD to burn themselves to prove me wrong!...
(c; You also got burned if you touched the body of the car (becoming
part of my ground plane array) below 20 meters. The car body was quite a
few hundred volts off ground-ground, especially the lower in frequency
you got. If you stuck your arm out the window and someone whistled on
160 meters, you could feel your fingers buzzing....

I still have it all, except the batteries of course. The antenna is
stored in my shed, the linear and FT-900 are in their boxes inside. I
don't even have an external antenna up at home for the last couple of
years. Who needs ham radio? I got Skype and Echolink.

It was a great ride for many years I spent on the road working gov't
contracts for the Navy....

Remember - POWER is our FRIEND!



Fun reading Larry .... that's why I didn't snip a thing. But just think.
All of us ancient day radio nerds have been replaced by cell phones the
Internet and iPods. A shame in a way ... electronics and radio is a great
hobby.

Eisboch

For all you hams who are boaters...
 

"Eisboch" wrote in
:

Fun reading Larry .... that's why I didn't snip a thing. But just
think. All of us ancient day radio nerds have been replaced by cell
phones the Internet and iPods. A shame in a way ... electronics and
radio is a great hobby.

Eisboch


Anyone can just stop by any Radio Shack and see how very true that
statement is.... You can hardly find a fuse at Ratshack any more. The big
warehouse Ratshack closed and I think half of it is in my shed...(c; I
have a lifetime supply of #2, 4 and 8 fine stranded black and red power
cables I got out of a truck full of boxed cables and wound on spools,
including miles of Ratshack's nice #10 speaker cable zipcord. AT the
current price of copper, it's worth more than my truck!

Let's not make me sick saying "Ipod". Let's say MP3 players. Ah, that's
better. Ipods suck but are expertly marketed....



--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.

For all you hams who are boaters...
 

"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 14:59:15 -0400, Wayne.B
wrote:

On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 18:26:47 GMT, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:

How do you guys stand it?

My boat doesn't even plane at 10 knots.

Slow and steady wins the race, and a good autopilot relieves the
tedium factor. I enjoy running on a fast plane for an hour or two but
after that I'm ready to relax a bit. Out in the ocean on a nice day,
no traffic and running on autopilot, it really doesn't get much
better: Plenty of time to navigate, check the weather, take in the
sights, grab a snack, etc., and no issues with taking a wave wrong or
smacking a log at 25 to 30 kts.

I can't tell you how many times I've had faster boats flying by me,
only to see them tied up at the next fuel dock as we go by.

We get to pick when and where we refuel. Only one stop required
between SWFL and CT, carefuly selected for best price.

I suppose.

Just not my cup of tea.

Although somebody close to me would much prefer it to zipping along.


----------------
Disclaimer: This is a boating post and applies to boaters. It is not
intended to provoke, annoy, irritate, bother, aggravate, anger,incite,
inflame, infuriate or create controversy resulting in unacceptable
behavior on the part of other posters nor is it intended to generate
political commentary or off-topic debate.

About a boat like this. Local guy in the fishing group has one.
Viking 68c
Series 2000-V16 M91 2030 MHP

Will go faster than 10 knots.

For all you hams who are boaters...
 

Short Wave Sportfishing wrote in
:

My very first phone DX contact was with a Heathkit 10 meter "lunchbox"
off an 11 meter CB whip on the back of my then boss's VW Bus which was
the TV delivery van. A DL1 as I recall. On a radio I built with my
own two hands. :)

I was so excited about it that I forgot my call sign at the time.


My introduction to ham radio came at the hands of some really old hams in
Moravia, NY. Jerry Hess, K2HWC, owned a surplus electronics shop on main
street, a junk warehouse of WW2 he used to buy/sell in a bombed out
storefront whos best feature was a coal-fired pot belly stove that kept
the place toasty warm all winter and a great place for us little nerds to
hang out. Debbie Hart, a nice old man who live a few streets away from
us, was a retired radio/TV repairman. By the time I was 9 years old, I
could find a net on Debbie's National NC-303 receiver, zero the
Hallicrafters HT-32 transmitter to the net frequency, tune the
transmitter to a fine pitch and be checked in using Debbie's call, which
at the moment I cannot remember from 1955, though I sent it for nearly 2
years almost nightly. Debbie took me under his wing, mistakenly, then,
like Mr Wilson and Dennis, couldn't get rid of me....or my other friends
totally enthralled with ham radio.

The old guys hung around Jerry's stove one Saturday morning, as they did
EVERY Saturday morning since before WW2, and finally decided if they ever
wanted to get to use their own stations, again, they'd better get us our
own ham licenses and build some Novice stations for us to take home.

For weeks, on Jerry's tired old wooden workbench I can still visualize
piled up with the residue of years of building and repairing junk, they
pulled stuff out of Jerry's attic warehouse, tore apart priceless WW2
equipments and we each ended up with a homebrew novice transmitter (5Y3
rectifier and a 6V6 xtal oscillator/power amp with plugin coils lovingly
hand wound for 80, 40 and 15 meters. An assortment of huge old Navy and
Army crystals materialized that us boys used to swap amoungst ourselves
so we could move across the bands to new territories without encroaching
onto the old ham's off-limits DX. 15 watts, TV twinlead balanced feeders
to 3 folded dipoles, also made of TV twinlead Jerry must have had 10
miles of on various spools and we were on the air! Several old, not-so-
stable receivers, like my Hallicrafters Sky Buddy, came to us after some
feelers put out on the central NY 75 meter AM phone net. Many old hams
responded with receivers, parts, coils-to-drool-over for exotic antenna
tuners....mostly built on scraps of 2X4s our mothers were terrified of
because they had seen some of our more famous flashovers and arcs or
exploding 6V6s. (If the plate falls into the grounded beam forming plates
it takes out the 5Y3, too. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.)

I wore the dial cord out on the Sky Buddy more than once scanning for DX.
I also was moved from my bedroom to my fathers garage in a little heated
room he made for my hamshack so they could get some sleep at night away
from my whooping and ranting from working some Russian or Japan or other
exotic place. I remember causing quite a stir in 5th grade by bringing
in my first QSL card from a Russian, via the Moscow Radio Club at KGB
headquarters, of course. That was on 15M Novice CW about 1957. I was
already famous for bringing in cards and letters from WOM, WCC, NSS, etc.
confirming my copying (sometimes better than they could) some ship comms
to the shore stations on the old marine bands. That's where I learned
how to copy CW to get my license. (I didn't know until I heard the code
machine that Morse was supposed to be sent WITHOUT the chirping from the
ship's nasty CW transmitter jumping frequency.)

Of course, this sealed my fate in school as a smartass and none of the
girls would have anything to do with me....unless their record player
wasn't working, of course. (This hasn't changed since I was 12. They
still call me only to fix something.) Such is our fate....It's all ham
radio's fault, you know...(c;

--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.

For all you hams who are boaters...
 

Short Wave Sportfishing wrote in
:

Henry 2KD amp highly modified

Mr Henry made some really nice amps. I had a Collins 30S-1 for a while
until some ham in Georgia wanted it so bad he met my I-don't-really-want-
to-sell-it price I figured I'd never get. Don'tcha love hams with money?

I built a homebrew back in the 70's when an unlimited supply of 4-1000A
tetrodes became available from a broadcast biz run by a friend. Lots of
stations were converting to ceramic tubes in those days.

The amp was in a WW2 Navy M series rack that was about 7' high and 24"
wide. Power supply was a 7200V, 5KVA pole pig running off the output of
a 30A, 240VAC Variac marked "Plate Kilovolts" to match the 270 degree GE
monster meters up on the power amp module. A pair of 6080 power tubes
provided a nicely regulated screen power supply because, unlike most hams
that hook them up in grounded grid for simplicity, I was bound to use
them as they were intended, tetrode AB1, common cathode. A regulated
fixed grid bias supply had a front panel control marked "IDLE CURRENT".
The grid input circuit was a 200 watt carbon pile of resistors at 52
ohms, cooled by the fan pressurizing the chassis of the power amp module,
which blew up through the two 4-1000A proper airflow sockets into their
nice chimneys....all very commercial quality. A screen-shielded window
in the front of the amp module let you watch the pair of 4-1000As in
action.

Filament current for two tubes meant unwinding the secondaries off a big
240VAC primary transformer and winding my own to provide that much stable
current. A security keyswitch on the front panel and two 240VAC air
conditioner contactors provided primary power control. Coaxial relays on
the amp provided antenna changeover control. There was even an antenna
selection rotary relay with 6 outputs selectable from the front panel of
the amp. My favorite antenna was a 75 meter full wave loop strung
horizontally between 4 perfectly-place oak trees in my neighbor's pasture
he kept horses in next door, one of the trees right over my hamshack.

The power amp had a WW2 Navy rotary inductor with front panel turns
counter. The coil was square conductor about 1/8" square cross section
an about 8" in diameter. I never had it on 160M, but it would tune down
to the top of the AM broadcast band, easily. Plate tuning cap of this
shunt-fed pi output matching was a 30KV, 30A, 1500pf vacuum variable.
Output cap was an open air beast in 2 sections that came out of the
antenna tuning unit of a 5KW AM station that went dark, as did my
rectifier stack and filter chokes. Fed up with blowing the coupling
capacitor from the plates to the output pi, a rather large .01uf, 30A,
15KV broadcast ceramic cap was refitted. The others I had melted, not
flashed over...(c;

Of course, all this was overkill running it at 1KW on the ham bands, even
100% duty cycle on 20M RTTY for hours on end. I'm not a real math wiz
when it comes to calculating plate power, especially in the heat of
workin' some rare DX on a Pacific island that only is out of the water at
low tide, hmm.....950ma, 6200VDC....lessee....yeah, that's pretty close
to a kilowatt in, right?....(c; Hearing the 5KVA power transformer that
ran THREE houses buzzing away when it was on the air, I called the stupid
rural electric coop to warn them before it exploded. They poo-pooed my
request for more amps, but became believers when I blew the bottom out of
the transformer, setting an oil fire that burned up the whole pole to the
ground! A new pole and 15KVA beast seemed to cure the problem. I told
them my neighbor had a new hot water heater...(c;

You could get about 3500 W out of it with 10 watts of drive into the grid
dummy load resistor. It was so high gain I added a "volume control" pot
marked "GRID DRIVE" so you could turn the input power up to a more easily
manageable level for a 100W transceiver, then adjust the drive to what
you needed...minimum power, of course....and that prevented those
impressive flashovers unwanted modulation peaks created when you were
trying NOT to overdrive it running 10W from a 100W radio.

The crowning moment was when I came into the local ham club meeting with
a 2' section of completely melted RG-8 coax soon after building it. You
could see the smile on my face miles away...(c; One of our members was
chief engineer of another AM station that had an end-fed halfwave on 1220
Khz. He used RG-17A/U to feed it at that high voltage and gave me a few
hundred feet of 17A claiming I couldn't melt it. He was right...

About 10 years later, I moved to smaller quarters in Florida and sold
that amp to a North Carolina CBer who had been drooling over it for years
for $3500. I gave him 8 sets of 4-1000As in the deal, knowing he was
going to blow them trying to be king of the hill on CB...(c;

That was my last big amp....The next amp I had was the best one ever
made, a National NCL-2000 2KW desk amp with a pair of 8122 ceramic
tetrodes from RCA hooked up, also, as proper tetrode amps, common
cathode. Hams never learned how to properly tune them for SCREEN
CURRENT, not plate current, and blew lots of 8122s in the process.
Properly tuned, a desktop NCL2000 was has loud as a Collins or Henry
floor amp and would also operate on RTTY for hours without exploding at a
kilowatt. I've kicked myself ever since for selling it to W4ZMZ, a
Baptist preacher who lost the amp in a fire. What a waste....(snif)

Carrier on my signal? No problem.......(c; I used to tell them I was
rotating my 75M tower array around as I cranked up the big variac with my
foot. "How's that? Can you hear me over his carrier, now?", I'd ask.
My buddy a hundred miles away said I was the only one on the air that
could pin the S-meter on his Collins 75S3-B...