[Amps] D & A & Other Sweep Tube Amplifiers

[Gene Bigham]

O.K. I can come out of the closet and say I have owned about every size of amp D & A and a whole bunch of other manufactures made back in the day.  It was called CB'er broke it and wanted to throw it away and the ham was there to salvage it, fix it and try it out.  The phantom was a heafty amp and cheaper/better built than many other 10 meter sweep tube amps at the time (remember these sweep tube amps were still in the ARRL handbook).  Sweep tubes were cheap too, 6mj6's, a ruggidized version of the 6lq6 with about 50 watts of plate dissapation or was it 18 watts no I think that was for the sylvania 6lq6?  Anyway the ruggidized 6mj6 could be purchased for less than $9 each, I think I gave $6 each for 20 of them one time, and would last forever in this amp if you took care of them and knew what you were doing loading the thing up.
I put a low pass filter on the input and the output, used a low power 10 meter rig (that is spelled I converted an 11 meter SSB Cobra 128 with PAL VFO to 10 meter service) to drive with and was off and running high power when needed.  Had a CB neighbor who did not much appreciate me at the time, but never bothered TV's in the area.  I was in rural area at the time.  This and a Moonraker 4 up about 60 foot level worked great for me.  There was no dead band, low sunspot, periods.  Take a listen to 11 meters right now and see what I mean, the band is never really dead completely.  And on cold winter nights during low sunspot activity you might work arora back scatter, or long distance ground wave out to several hundred miles weak signal.  Had a friend with a Moonraker 6 and a Black Cat amplifier with a pair of 3-500z's.  I could hear him S9 from about 100 miles away.
Ok, thanks for the rant.
KB0GU