Topband: 160M Rhombics

[Carl]

Those Alpha 77's, DX or SX went thru the Nye tuners shown and they were 
maxed out at around 4KW.

The rack stuff was old school with glass tubes and mercury vapor rectifiers 
and took a lot of room for modest power. Don still enjoyed AM which is what 
most of that stuff was. The tubes you can see are pretty small and maybe the 
2 x 4-1000A amps were gone when those pix were taken.

Before that the racks held PP 450TL's with little to no shielding and pre 
WW2 the bottles such as the 851/852 barely made it to 20M.
I dont believe Ive heard or saw pictures of him using tubes such as the 
750TL and 1000 to 2000T.

So yeah, 3-5KW CW and AM was the norm there and a 77SX will barely do 3KW on 
SSB with the stock SX transformer and I dont see any external iron in those 
pix. Remember that a 5KW carrier on AM fully modulated is 20KW PEP and with 
the voltages on those open wire lines those tuner caps needed lots of 
spacing.

Carl
KM1H


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Mike Waters
To: Carl
Cc: topband
Sent: Friday, July 26, 2013 5:38 PM
Subject: Re: Topband: 160M Rhombics


Could be. Here's some photos of Don's station, FWIW: 
http://www.qsl.net/ne6i/w6am/shack.html . Alpha amplifiers, and huge tall 
racks that look like they might require one of those Alphas to drive them. 
But who can say for sure? :-)

For whatever reason, there's what seems to be a lot of hype about W6AM's 
rhombics. Such as:

"The W6AM station was legendary around the world. Don could beat you in a 
pileup for some obscure African station no matter what band, and even if you 
were on the east coast. And him in Southern California.

"Don was #1 on ARRL's DXCC Honor Roll, and you didn't argue. No matter where 
you were, no matter what you were running, Don had beaten you in a pileup. 
More than once."

Beat anyone on the east coast to Europe from California every time? I'm 
sorry, but a rhombic is just not that good, even if you DO have one pointed 
at every direction of the compass as W6AM did.

More info and photos:
http://www.qsl.net/ne6i/w6am/recollections.html
http://www.qsl.net/ne6i/w6am/others.html

73, Mike
www.w0btu.com


On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 3:58 PM, Carl <km1h at jeremy.mv.com> wrote:

I dont see anything from then that disagrees with what I said today Mike,

QRO in those days was a smaller ratio from what is daily these days.





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