[Amps] How many other Hunter Bandit 2000C owners out there?

[John Becker]

> Hi all, I aquired one of these amps before I moved from NC.  I haven't even put it on the air yet.  I plan to install a soft start and replace the rectifier diode first.  Mine has the original 3-400z tubes in it and I saw it with 1350+ PEP before I bought it.  It's a neat looking classic amp that appears to be so basic that there is room for a lot of mods.  Waht if any have you other owners or past owners done?
> Thanks,
> Cam 
> WA4JKW
>   
I built one of these from a kit for the W9BGX Northwestern University 
club station in about 1966. In the remaining time I was there, we only 
had a couple of problems with it. The output started dropping off and I 
found the solder connections on the filament choke assembly were bad. 
This was a pre-built assembly, the choke and some lugs and a mounting 
bracket, not something that had been soldered in building the kit. After 
re-soldering the lugs, the amp put out more power than it had when it 
was new. I also had to re-solder the filament pins on at least one of 
the tubes. I think I remember that it had gone completely open.

In 1968, I operated some contests from the QTH of W9EXE, now W9RX, who 
also had a Bandit 2000C. He had added some brackets between the front 
panel and the case in an attempt to solve some TVI problems, because the 
original design was far from RF-tight. It wasn't pretty, but apparently 
it worked. At the end of one of the contest weekends, there was a big 
run of JAs on 10M, and by the time it ended you could smell the hot 
plate transformer all over the house. The amp survived, but clearly I 
had been pushing it to its duty-cycle limit.

73,

John, K9MM