[Amps] HV Diodes

Manfred Mornhinweg manfred at ludens.cl
Thu Oct 16 17:43:47 EDT 2014


Carl,

> If you knew as much about amp history as you may not know about other 
> ham items you would know that Alpha has used potted diode blocks since 
> the 1970's. 

Indeed I'm not a specialist in historical ham equipment, specially not in 
US-made tube amplifiers. I'm more at home in the solid state realm, and more in 
the present than the past.

  > Instead of continuing the guesswork why dont you ask Alpha what is inside?

I'm too shy to do that. I think it's fine to waste my own time musing about this 
stuff, while I feel too sick to get up from the shack seat, and OK to waste the 
time of other people who choose to hang out around here and probably enjoy it, 
but wasting the time of an Alpha employee who surely has more important things 
to do, would be almost criminal.

> OTOH I stated "almost universal" knowing exactly your reply, and Alpha 
> is far from high volume compared to others using 1N5408's.

What other currently manufactured full legal limit amplifiers exist? I'm really 
not up to date on which are still being made! I thought that Alpha is pretty 
much the best known. At least here in Chile the only relatively new full legal 
limit amps I get to see are Alphas, and when people drool about a quality amp, 
they think Alpha. There are a lot of hams using old amps, most of them with 
voltage doublers, and I have also seen a couple of lower power, lower cost 
Ameritrons and the like, and several 1kW Japanese amplifiers of the well known 
brands, such as the Kenwood TL922. But I can't remember right now having seen 
any other 1500W, new tube amplifier.

> Next?

Something will pop up! ;-)

Manfred


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