[Amps] Ham Tests, was Price per Watt Conversation

[Jim Brown]

If the conversation was about EmComm, then why wasn't that listed on the 
Subject Line?  :)  And how did we get to EmComm from Price per Watt 
Conversation? And from there to a religious discussion of the virtues of 
CW, and how discontinuing a CW requirement has destroyed ham radio. None 
of which I accept. My response was to W8HW, whose perception of CW 
activity differs from mine by an order of magnitude. Like I said 
earlier, I'm a CW op, have been all my life. But I don't try to deny 
reality by saying the CW bands are hopping when they are not.

Several days ago, I went nearly a week back in that thread to find 
anything about Price per Watt! Why? Because being the son of 
accountants, I wanted to add to that conversation the additional factor 
of the useful life of the amplifier.

That's how I look at an investment -- if I spend $3K to buy a power amp 
(or a radio), I expect it to last a while. I own three Titans that I 
bought used for about $1.5K each and have used for more than ten years. 
If I sell one for $1K (I should be able to get more), it's cost me $50 
per year for 1.5kW.  Which works out to $0.033 per year per watt. And -- 
if I'd bought it new around 1987 for $3K and it dies in 2017, it's cost 
me $100 a year for 1.5 kW, that's $0.066 per watt per year. One of those 
three amps lost it's transformer over the winter, so this is not a 
hypothetical. :)

Why did I go through those examples? Because that long discussion 
morphed into the service life of solid state and hollow state devices. 
When we have to give up on a product because parts become unobtainium 
(remember the first Ten Tec solid state amp, when Motorola discontinued 
the devices only a year or two into production?)

73, Jim K9YC

On Fri,4/28/2017 6:11 PM, Carl wrote:
> You might be going on 76 Jim but when you cant stay on subject I begin 
> to wonder.
>
> Im going on 77 and knew the subject was about emergency comms, not 
> daydreaming in the home ham shack.