[Amps] SS amps watercooling - was PowerGenius XL

[Manfred Mornhinweg]

Hi all,

It's my humble opinion that this whole thread on how to cool high power 
solid state amplifiers, using water (or evaporation, oil, freon, 
whatever) is on the wrong track.

Instead of using high power amplifiers built basically like small signal 
amplifiers on steroids, that is, transistors acting as RF-controlled 
variable resistors that drop more or less of the supply's voltage to 
produce the desired waveform, and thus incur in huge power loss that has 
to be removed as heat, we should be building high efficiency amplifiers, 
in which the transistors act as RF-controlled switches, so that the 
power loss is tiny and can be easily handled with very modestly sized 
heatsinks.

The broadcasters have been doing it for ages. It's about high time that 
we "technologically advanced" hams do it too. A handful of hams are 
actually doing it, but most hams still cling to antiquated and 
inefficient technology, and that's really a shame.

I don't mean to blame any individual ham. For a single individual it 
does take a considerable effort to think totally outside the box and 
come up with a good, highly efficiency, low distortion power amplifier 
that doesn't break the bank. But collectively we should be able to move 
standard ham equipment technology from class AB linear amps to something 
much better.

Manfred




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