[Today: rest day]
Success!
Short version: I cleaned up my mess and the thing works as expected.
Long version:
I built the thing; I had a couple of glitches along the way. But I was pretty sure I had it put together correctly, in the general sense. The last step was to tune it up and aim for 5 watts of output. The directions specified how to set the no-drive bias current. And, as you recall, my bias current was some out of whack number.
So I looked it over and I pondered the schematic and I tried to take measurements.
Eventually I broke down and sent a few emails out.
It frequently is the case that I’ll find some elementary problem after hitting “send”. This time it took a bit longer.
I actually had “tuned” it up such that I got it on the air and had a few QSO’s during the November Sweepstakes CW contest.
But then I got an email back from the kit designer. He confirmed the numbers in the directions and that my out-of-whack reading was not within the expected range of good values. He suggested I take pictures of my board, front and back, and send them to him. I proceeded to take a video, which I will attach at the end of this post.
I find the shiny soldery side to be very hard to see. In looking it over, I finally decided there was one place that I had forgotten to solder and another place where the solder looked a little lax.
The place I had forgotten to solder was on the right-hand leg of diode D5. In the video at the :27 mark you can see right through the hole. It’s not supposed to be that way.
I touched up both of those two places, went back to my measuring setup, and I measured the zero-drive idle current at 92 mA, very close to the published value of 95 mA. Following the rest of the directions, I soon had the thing putting out well over 5 watts. I set it at 5.14, or some such number; as close to 5 watts as I could get.
It’s a win!
Now I need to go back to all of my question email places and be embarrassed about having missed soldering in a component!