Have had the Palstar AT4K here since setting up my
big Henry amplifier. They get along just fine together.
A "feature" about the Palstar: the roller L is made for
them by Henry Radio! It bears a very strong resemblence
to the roller L in the RF deck of my Henry amp. And, so
far mine turns very smoothly. I also have an ancient
EF Johnson kW Matchbox which is switched "to" from
the Palstar via the Coax 2 "Untunned" setting. From the
Matchbox, use 4" spaced ladder line out to an 80 meter
doublet. Both tuners do fine jobs for me, have had no
problems with either. (Well, when first firing up the Henry
amp, I ran way too much drive power in; the 3CX3000
tube promptly put out some 4 or so kW, and the poor little
torroid power sample gizmo in the Palstar metering circuit
had a fit! Insulation on the torroid windings was fried,
and the diode detectors were both zapped good! Am
very careful now about not exceeding drive into the big
Henry!!) Palstar, at no cost to me, sent an entire new
metering circuit assembly to me to replace the one I
killed; have external metering anyway, so have never
bothered to install it since removing all the fried stuff;
units have worked well together ever since; and I
promised never again to exceed legal power! Use both in-
line Bird meter and an RF Applications VFD to constantly
monitor both vswr and peak output power (VFD does a
fine job of instant peak power readout). Use a 100 watt
slug in the Bird, always set to reverse power reading; a
snap to set up either tuner this way. Also use a big
Bird coaxial resistor (aka dummy load) with the Palstar
complete "Bypass" setting to tweak up the Henry before
transmitting. I believe with this set up, I transmit about
the most linear and clean signal on the bands! And everything
here runs real cool, with lots of headroom.
73, Jim KH7M
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