Peter Chadwick wrote:
> The mechanics of the cooling of the SS amp, plus the low voltage,
> high current wiring and PSU, make the kW SS amp a bit more
> complicated than the tube amp, at least to my mind. The overall
> efficiency is no better, the flexibility to handle high (up to 3:1)
> SWR requires a built in tuner, which at low impedance can lead to
> awkwardly higher capacitances on variables unless the impedance is
> stepped up, all suggest that for home brewing, tubes are easier.
> Forgetting, for the moment, costs, of course.......
Everything that you say is true, but given that one wants near-instant
band-change, it's much less expensive to match your antennas to less
than 2:1 and go solid state (no built-in tuner needed) than it is to
build or buy an automatically tuned tube amplifier. And I submit that
it's probably less expensive to build a solid state amplifier *with* a
built-in tuner than an automatically tuned tube amplifier. We'll see
about this if and when the Elecraft solid-state amplifiers are finally
released.
> And we don't frequency hop that fast - not even in the SS contests!
Well, I do. There's one particular contest that I'm interested in where
this is useful. And in these days of telnet clusters, you have only a
few seconds to work a DX station before the pileup develops.
I've owned both a fine, legal-limit, manually tuned amplifier (with a
3-minute warmup time) and an unstable, fragile, 750-watt solid-state
amplifier. My operating style caused me to favor the solid-state
amplifier. I probably would have been happier with an Alpha 87 or Acom
2000, but then, who wouldn't?
--
73,
Vic, K2VCO
Fresno CA
http://www.qsl.net/k2vco
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