The dumbness around can be astonishing. In my neck of the woods (Chile),
there is a new fashion among hams. They found out that 100 watt radios
don't produce a constant 100W output on SSB, but do so on CW. So they
found the solution: They place three voice compressors in a daisy chain,
and crank them up until they get a full 100 Watt output in SSB even
while they are not talking. Then they are satisfied, knowing they are
doing the right thing, "helping" their radios work at their true
potential, as they like to say.
I see myself increasingly often turn off the radio and do something else
instead of hamming.
These same people have discovered that radios will produce higher output
if you defeat the ALC. So, they love to defeat the ALC in their radios,
and the "secret information" of which trimpot has to be turned which way
to do that, on each model of radio, is handled like classified strategic
information by them. Indeed they manage to get 140 to 170 watts from
their radios. Of course, they don't even notice that only about 100
watts of this falls within the the 3kHz channel, while the remainder is
splattered out over the entire band and beyond it. They don't have any
concept of spectral purity.
But there is a good thing in this defeating of the ALC, and then
operating through three compressors in a chain: Soon enough, these
radios land on my surgery desk, with dead final transistors. I'm
charging 180 dollars to replace the finals and re-adjust the ALC to its
correct level. These people are keeping me well fed.
Manfred.
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Visit my hobby homepage!
http://ludens.cl
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