[Amps] premade HV rectifier board

[Manfred Mornhinweg]

Hi Rag, Chris, and all,

> It'll be a lot dearer than making a board using 6A10
> diodes yourself though.

I agree with that. I think it's a mighty waste of money to buy such 
encapsulated high voltage rectifiers. Sure, they look "professional", if 
that's what a ham wants in his amplifier... But a simple string of plain 
common cheap diodes will do the same job, at a small fraction of the cost.

In my old amplifier I use strings of five 1N5408 diodes. This amp has a 
voltage doubling power supply, so the voltage stress is the same, and 
the current stress is twice as much as the diode strings in a bridge 
rectifier for the same DC voltage and current would be exposed to. Still 
five of these diodes provide plenty safety margin. I'm using them since 
15 years ago, and they have never failed. Instead the original rectifier 
modules of that amp, which were rated at only 750mA, failed.

Note that these diode strings are plain, simple and pure, without any 
resistors nor capacitors in parallel. The mentioned diodes have very low 
reverse current, and benign avalanche characteristics, which makes those 
resistors and capacitors totally superfluous. And you can buy these 
diodes locally almost anywhere in the world, for very little money.

Manfred



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