Hi Gang,
This weekend the W3LPL crew completed it's annual
shakedown cruise in the CQ WW RTTY contest with
a full bore multi-multi entry. 48 hours of RTTY at
1500 watts does tend to shake out the bugs...
(literally so... one crawled into the 4KV 6 amp DC
power supply late Saturday nite and gave the 20 meter
operator a big thrill!)
This year we evaluated a brand new toy for serious
contesters: W3NQN's new 20 meter 2KW low pass filter.
This filter has 74 dB ( ! ) attenuation on 10 meters
and only 0.25 dB insertion loss on 20 meters (1600 watts
into the filter produces 1500 watts at the filter output).
I must admit that I was extremely skeptical about the
prospects for this filter surviving 1500 watts of RTTY
for 48 hours with four different 20 meter antenna systems
all with somewhat different VSWRs. After the first 10
minutes of operating the filter was noticably warm; however,
it never got any warmer during the entire contest. When
the contest ended I took the covers off and the only warm
components were the copper inductances (three 1/8"
diameter coils). All capacitors were cool to the touch
and looked exactly as they did 48 hours before when the
filter was new.
I must say this filter is a big winner, and is now a permanent
part of my 20 meter station's "artillary."
Anyone who would like to acquire one should contact Ed
W3NQN at 410-268-0916. Price is $150 plus shipping,
a real bargain for an awesome piece of engineering
excellence! A 40 meter 2000 watt low pass filter is
now undergoing initial testing by K3LR and I'll have one at
station soon.
My station is now uses nearly 2 dozen W3NQN RF filters.
Each of the FT-1000MPs has a W3NQN receive-only high
performance bandpass filter at the receive antenna input, and
each FT-1000MP has a 200 watt W3NQN bandpass filter on the
output. The result is a multi-multi operating environment
that produces few squeaks and groans between bands;
a vast improvement over the best available previous technology.
73
Frank
W3LPL
donovanf@erols.com
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