[Amps] TWE T500M Linear amp

[David G4FTC]

>What I'm intrigued is about power rating; because it's fed from 13.6V 
> >supply, a 500 watts output one suppose a big load to the batteries, so I 
>guess it's a
>500 watts input one, am I wrong?

I can’t offer any advice on the MLA500/T500M but from what I can recall the 
DC current consumption of the TW500A is in the order of 70 amps.

IMHO the TW500A suffered from one very significant shortcoming - the power 
supply was a simple non regulated capacitive input 13V supply. I think you 
can probably imagine what the supply rail did with a heavy duty cycle load 
peaking at 70 amps.

The TW500A was rated at 500 watts O/P but I never saw more than about 400 
watts of non-compressed SSB with proportionally less for higher duty cycle 
modes.

Perhaps the short between the bases of the O/P transistors had been added to 
improve supply rail stability (at the expense of output power)!

However having said that I have worked a station using one on SSB (5U7JB I 
think) and it sounded OK.

73s

David G4FTC