[Amps] Uruguay Amp Project

[Patrick Barthelow]

Folks, 

In the course of helping a YL build an amp in Uruguay, I am making progress, but am amazed at the challeges faced by hams there, and probably other small countries, who want to buy or build ham gear, particularly amps.  I found an  insider representative in the Uruguay broadcast tramsmitter industry who is looking for spare broadcast transmitter parts, suitable for Amateur amps, such as tubes, transformers, power supply parts, etc for this ham.

 

He said, in the commercial TX world repairs or parts acquisition is difficult and expensive, and a main vendor they rely on is Nebraska Radio Sales.  OUCH(!)  NRS seems to have insanely high prices on QRO RF components, at least to me they seem high.  To add insult to injury this insider says every purchase, say for a $1000 vacuum variable, or say a transformer has a $1000 (equal amount) dollar duty tacked on before he can bring it in. OUCH!  Says there are a lot of solid state Broadcast TX there, but also a lot of older tube transmitters, in the 1-10KW range as spares, backups so I am hopeful to find the heavy parts for a power supply there, to save money...In the olden days, here, the 4-400A was a common find if you trolled radio station engineers for spares, probably not so much any more. 

As to commercial ham gear I bet they also pay a super high tax on retail gear brought in, so anyone in CX land on the air, has committed considerable economic effort to do so.

 

I wonder if this lady could find usable components in a junked 1KW microwave oven for a power supply, diodes, or caps, transformer, etc?  The last microwave oven that I took apart, had some hefty lookig HV diodes, and what looked like a transistorized flyback style HV generator.   I will have to look through arciived threads on the reflector here....


Best Regards,   
73, de Pat Barthelow AA6EG

 		 	   		  
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