On Tue,1/3/2017 7:23 AM, Manfred Mornhinweg wrote:
Bill,
I have experienced several such cases of fellow hams blowing crud all
over a band, and "not hearing" those who report the problem. But most
of the offenders I have heard are operating factory-made equipment!
Very often they use a 100W radio to drive an amp that needs 50W or
less of drive, and don't connect the ALC line.
USING ALC to control drive level for a power amplifier is a CAUSE of
splatter and clicks. ALC should NEVER be used to set drive level. The
ONLY good reason for using ALC between rig and power amp is to protect
solid state output stages from damage due to a fault in the antenna system.
Radios with slow-acting ALC are also famous for causing IMD blasts and
key clicks without even needing an amp, and there are many. But the
most usual way of producing lousy signals is by intentionally
defeating the ALC of the transceivers. In my environment they call it
"liberating" the radio, because the poor radio was tied down to just
100W by the evil manufacturer, and by defeating that "brake" it can
produce 150W or so, when turning the mic gain to full and then
screaming into the mike, right?
I can't imagine what you are talking about. Since the days of separate
TX and RX, I don't remember ever seeing a rig that didn't allow
adjustment of output power.
Sometimes radios develop faults that make the transmission dirty. I
remember a case of one station running a factory-made radio with a bad
PLL. It had an extremely high phase noise, and would transmit
modulated noise over a wide part of the band. That guy did reply to my
report, and told me that he had the same very high noise on RX, so he
thought that I was hearing what he thought was his local noise floor!
I tried to explain to him that probably his radio was faulty, and I
went on to explain about phase noise in frequency synthesizers and how
that can affect both TX and RX, but he totally rejected my suggestion
that his radio was faulty. He replied that his radio was putting out
"the full 100 watts and some more", and thus couldn't possibly be
faulty...
The error in this paragraph is that the radio "developed" a fault. Many
rigs are DESIGNED with massive phase noise and nasty clicks.
73, Jim K9YC
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