[TowerTalk] ICE 419?

[k3mm at verizon.net]

 I've never had a failure of my 419's, but plenty with my old Dunestars.

One thing that can cause a lot of problems is running a tuner on your radio into a bandpass filter...especially if you have a bad match into  your amp or antenna.  Tuners make the radio happy, but not the device it's "forcing" power into...it can create huge voltages that will cause the caps to fail...or antenna components to fail...etc.

Also, if the filters are a little out of tune, the tuner will try to compensate, creating even more stress on the filter...leading to accelerated failure.

Ty K3MM
 
 
On 01/23/12, Jim Brown<jim at audiosystemsgroup.com> wrote:
 
On 1/21/2012 4:00 PM, k2qmf at juno.com wrote:
> I seem to recall there was a cap or two that
> went bad in some 419's...

I've had nothing but trouble with the two 419As I bought several years 
ago. I'm guessing that the caps are simply under-rated for dissipation, 
because it's common for them to fail with only 100W at 2:1 or lower VSWR.

My experience has been that they won't handle more than the 30-50W it 
takes to drive my Titan amps. At that level, they seem to hold up OK. 
They're currently sitting in my storeroom, having been replaced by a 
pair of W3NQNs that are on long term loan.

If you're going to replace any of these caps, I'd try to find some with 
higher dissipation ratings.

73, Jim K9YC
_______________________________________________



_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk at contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk