I have already reported to the readers here that
Paul at Ten-Tec advised that it was necessary to
replace the finals in my Jupiter. Rig should be on
it's way back tomorrow.
My obvious question at that point was what would
have caused the problem. Obviously at this point, it
is a speculative exercise, but one of the things
that Paul suggested was that if the rig had
transmitted into an open or shorted feedline
(antenna).. even momentarily, it was possible that
oscillations were initiated in the finals that lead
to excessive current draw and their demise.
He asked me what kind of power supply I had, since
there are many PS's out there that do not provide
the load protection needed to insure that the above
does not occur. I told him I had a Astron 35M,
which has been in service for several years. He
suggested that that might be part of the problem,
but when I asked him about Ten-Tec PS units he said
that the current product line does not have that
sort of protection built in either. (I gathered the
earlier ones did)
I just called Astron, who are local to me (Irvine)
They told me that both the current RM power supplies
and my older one had current limiting and voltage
protection. In fact, although I have not tried it,
he said that I could put a screw driver across the
output terminals and observe that the voltage goes
down to "zero" and when that short is removed it
returns to the nominal output voltage.
No question here... unless you want to offer
something that might give me some comfort when I
power up the Jupiter once again. At this point I
can only conclude that my original finals had a weak
link in there somewhere.
Bill
Costa Mesa, CA
Amateur Radio Station: W6WLB
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