[Amps] Conservation of Energy!

[Manfred Mornhinweg]

The dumbness around can be astonishing. In my neck of the woods (Chile), 
there is a new fashion among hams. They found out that 100 watt radios 
don't produce a constant 100W output on SSB, but do so on CW. So they 
found the solution: They place three voice compressors in a daisy chain, 
and crank them up until they get a full 100 Watt output in SSB even 
while they are not talking. Then they are satisfied, knowing they are 
doing the right thing, "helping" their radios work at their true 
potential, as they like to say.

I see myself increasingly often turn off the radio and do something else 
instead of hamming.

These same people have discovered that radios will produce higher output 
if you defeat the ALC. So, they love to defeat the ALC in their radios, 
and the "secret information" of which trimpot has to be turned which way 
to do that, on each model of radio, is handled like classified strategic 
information by them. Indeed they manage to get 140 to 170 watts from 
their radios. Of course, they don't even notice that only about 100 
watts of this falls within the the 3kHz channel, while the remainder is 
splattered out over the entire band and beyond it. They don't have any 
concept of spectral purity.

But there is a good thing in this defeating of the ALC, and then 
operating through three compressors in a chain: Soon enough, these 
radios land on my surgery desk, with dead final transistors. I'm 
charging 180 dollars to replace the finals and re-adjust the ALC to its 
correct level. These people are keeping me well fed.

Manfred.

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