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Re: Topband: terminating resistors

To: "Pete Smith" <n4zr@contesting.com>, <topband@contesting.com>
Subject: Re: Topband: terminating resistors
From: "Brad Rehm" <brehm@ptitest.com>
Reply-to: brehm@ptitest.com
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 15:45:19 -0600
List-post: <mailto:topband@contesting.com>
"I was cruising the Mouser catalogue and ran across some 20 watt Ohmite
non-inductive resistors in TO-220 cases that are described as "high pulse
tolerant" designs.  Any reason these wouldn't be a good choice for Beverage
terminating resistors, at $5 each, or is this overkill?

"73, Pete N4ZR"

Pete, I used these for a number of years and was very pleased with them.
They did eventually fail, however, because even with high-energy "pulse"
ratings, the small ceramic resistor element is prone to fracturing.  I have
since had much better luck using four or five 2-Watt carbon resistors in
parallel.

If I couldn't find any more of the 2-Watt carbon parts (Allied stocks a few
1-Watt values), I'd look at the Ohmite OX and OY resistors.  They are high
energy density parts with a lot of tolerance for overloads.  They have
low-inductance ceramic elements.  And they're easy to find--see Mouser,
Allied, DigiKey, etc.  Paralleling several of them would give you hundreds
of Joules of energy-handling capability.

I haven't used these on my Beverages yet (found plenty of carbon parts at
Dayton), but I have used them in several pulse applications at work.  I've
also found that the Ohmite 35J and 30J high energy wirewound resistors are
very tolerant of impulse overloads.  They'd be a little more inductive,
though.  You'd have to take some steps to deal with this because the
commonly-available values would make it necessary to use them in series.

73,
Brad, KV5V


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