[AMPS] "the old days"

Pete Smith n4zr@contesting.com
Tue, 13 Apr 1999 14:05:20 -0400


At 11:22 AM 4/13/1999 -0600, John T. M. Lyles wrote:
>
>Dick,
>
>You were one lucky guy with that DC accident! I somehow have avoided ugly
>DC shocks (i am knocking on my desk with my hand as I type this), but have
>had my share of 60 Hz touches, and plenty RF burns. 

This may have suffered in being filtered through 45 years of memory, but a
high-school friend had a BC-610 RF deck which, if I remember correctly, had
cone-shaped ceramic feed-through insulators on the back chassis edge, one
for RF output and the other for DC.  He reached behind the transmitter one
contest morning to change antennas and blammo -- he too woke up against the
opposite wall, but with a nasty divot out of his thumb and index fingers
from grabbing the DC instead of the antenna terminal.  Makes ya wonder how
we survived those days...

My personal experience was limited to lower-voltage DC -- does anyone else
remember the way that the Heathkit DX-35 ran the oscillator and driver
stages in series across the 600v. supply, so that the whole driver stage
was between 300 and 600 volts above ground?  That one cost me a multimeter
and some burned fingers.

73,  Pete N4ZR
Loud is good


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