Heavy Artillery

The same sale of surplus gear that bumped up my BNC socket stocks also saw me bid a tenner to win a wideband RF power amplifier, which runs 12 Watts, 200 kHz - 32 MHz, made by RF Power Labs, Inc. of Kirkland, WA. It had Albert, G3ZHE's sticker on it, so I knew it had come from a good home. Albert told be that previously it had been in Jim G3NFB's shack - it is nice to be keeping it in the Warrington family!

Today, I had chance to power it up and see what it does...

I hooked it up between the output of my multi-mode beacon (Blogs passim), which happened to be set to the 30m band, and the G5RV. Here is the "brick" on the bench...

You can just see one of my switched attenuators atop the amplifier, throwing away some of the input (the amplifier needs 1 Volt in for full rated output).

I was immediately spotted on WSPR in the USA by Edmund, WB1FIG, in Plainville, Massachusetts...

having previously only been heard in Europe.

I do get into the US on occasion with the standard 50mW on 30m, as demonstrated last night, when Douglas, W3HH, heard me once again in Florida...

Having fired WSPR signals over the pond with my new "big gun", I had a look to see if my other modes were being heard further afield. Sure enough, I could just make out my FSK-CW and Hell signals on Bill, W4HBK's grabber in Florida (although you do need to know where to look)...

Of course, the QRSS modes into Europe were loud and clear, as seen on Joachim, PA1GSJ's grabber...

In fact, Joachim was also reporting spotting my WSPR signals both during and after the 5 Watt QRO test. Switching from 5W back to 50mW is a x100 change in power (-20dB) and, sure enough, Joachim's reports showed pretty much a -20dB degradation in SNR between two adjacent spots...

So - the bench RF amplifier works a treat.

Apologies to anybody offended by the fact that I couldn't be bothered to change reported power in my WSPR message during the short test - it is a chore re-programming the PIC - mea culpa!

...-.- de m0xpd