Short Wave Sportfishing wrote in
:

a true Beverage out through the woods for low
bands (1600 feet)

I built a 20 meter Rhombic out across a farm one time, pointed at the S
Pacific. It worked fantastic, but you couldn't keep it aloft for long in
the storms. It also was a great "etherial power source". Any thunderstorm
within 10 miles would induce amazing voltages on its wires!

Can you say "EMP", without cursing this time?

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

Short Wave Sportfishing wrote in
:

I mean, none of these kids will ever know the excitement of loading up
a 100 watt light bulb as a dummy load and working a ham 100 miles away
by accident. :)



None of them will have the experience of holding a lit 40W flourescent tube
standing in the beam path of my '67 VW campmobile's stacked 4-element 2M
Cushcrafts fed with the modified Gonset power amp's 4CX250B running 800W on
2M FM, back when there was ONE repeater over a hundred miles
away....either. We figured around 9 to 10KW ERP....Troposcatter anyone?

I worked a guy in Arizona on 146.52 simplex from the top of Paris Mountain
in Greenville, SC, with it...(c; He was running his moonbounce station
around 30KW ERP at the time...4 stacked KLM 15 element yagis and a kilowatt
GE FM amp. Nice station for 2M.

The Gonset had a 4X150 in it when I got it. We built it a voltage doubler
to raise the plate up for the 250B and put newfangled silicon transistors
in the power switcher for more amps. Man that was a nice amp....useless
today.

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

snip

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;

snip

Yes, but isn't increasing the input power from 1KW to 6KW, disregarding
inefficiencies, only about 8dB signal increase?

"ACP" wrote in
:

Yes, but isn't increasing the input power from 1KW to 6KW, disregarding
inefficiencies, only about 8dB signal increase?



Yep. An 1KW is only 10 db above 100 watts and 20 db above 10 watts.....

8 db is a lot if it's 6 db above the NOISE FLOOR....(c;

Power is STILL our friend....Ask WSB, etc.



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