[TenTec] SDR-1000 vs Orion vs SDR-X

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Sat, Jul 15, 2006 at 04:14:06PM -0500, Jim wrote:
 
> FYI, The new 1500 Watt Solid State Amplifier that has been announced by
> Elecraft at Dayton, is probably going to be the first amplifier in the
> amateur radio industry that is solid state and runs 1500 watts out. How
> revolutionary is the fact to not have to ever buy an expensive pair of
> replacement Ceramic Tube finals in the future.

Obviously , you have never had to buy replacement MOSFETs for a 10 year old
amplifier. Tubes seem to hang on forever, MOSFETs get replaced with newer
and better models, which are not always useable in older amplifiers
every few years. 

Depending upon the design of the amplifier it's going to need a lot of
them if it's really 1500 Watts out. It's also going to need first class
overcurrent protection and lots of extra components to prevent it from
oscilations (picking up it's own signal and burning itself up in a feedback
loop).

This has been mentioned recently in the thread about circuit breakers. It
seems that while Ten-Tec decided to put the current limiting circuity in
the power supply they have never skimped on bypassing components and few
of their rigs fail from feedback loops.

 
> So, between the evolution of the Stepp-IR antennas, the upcoming solid state
> autotune amplifiers, and these new family of rigs, is amazing to see.

I believe that this was direct result of the FCC relaxing the rules on 
commercial HF amplifiers. Now that propigation is bad, there is a big 
market for them. For some reason, the Japanese market for big amps is small,
so although Yaseu and ICOM have solid state HF amps, AFIK Kenwood does not.

> Should be fun.

IMHO always is. :-)

Geoff.
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