[TenTec] which power supply…station efficiency

[denton sprague]

many decades ago, one of my first projects was home brewing a 30 amp 12 vdc regulated power supply….I used it for a number of years on various hf and TT rigs until I got my TT Omni 6…which for some odd reason kept blowing up the finals…think it went back to TT 3 times(!) for final and final driver replacement.
The tech asked me why power supply I was using on the third trip back..
I told him it was the home-brew one. Tech said it was probably an oscillation from the home-brew supply, that kept blowing up the rig finals. 
I dug out a 'scope and multimeter to run some diagnostics, but could find nothing amiss.
I stored the homebrew power supply and dug out the power supply that came with the rig. It has worked fb every since.
As far as I can determine, there is little in the way of isolation from the rig's finals to the power supply other than a ferrite choke on the B+ line going to the final brick….hence any kind of weird spikes or oscillations from one rig could affect the electrons in a second rig on the same power supply.

On Dec 13, 2013, at 7:04 PM, Ken Brown <ken.d.brown at hawaiiantel.net> wrote:

> 
>> I would prefer to have separate power supplies for each of the hf rigs just to get some isolation between them rf wise….has this been a problem with anyone else?
>> Have been using clamp on ferrite chokes on the dc line from the strip to the rigs but can't tell if they are really doing anything.
> 
> I'm curious about why you need "isolation between them rf wise" on the DC power leads. I think there should not be enough RF on the DC power leads to bother another radio connected to the same DC power supply. Is this a station where multiple operators are using the radios? Is more than one transceiver going to be transmitting at a time? If not, it would be more efficient to have one power supply that can supply the current draw of one transceiver in transmit mode and the rest in receive mode. That would be more efficient than multiple power supplies that can each supply enough current for a transceiver transmitting.
> 
> DE N6KB
> 
> 
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