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Ham Radio

More on the SS-TX40

[Wednesday: 3.5 miles; today 6.1]

Today I went to running group, came home, then zipped into town to go up the ham radio tower again.  I spent a few hours up there working on the feed line for a beam antenna.  I think that is looking pretty good.  The beam is now usable.  I may need to go up again eventually to point the thing a little better, so the direction of the beam works a bit better.

This week I have been working some more on the SS-TX40 transmitter.  I got all of the parts installed and it works.  But it is not giving me  the output that it should.  So I’m doing some debugging on that.  I’m hoping I won’t have to tear it up much to figure it out.  Circuit boards can only take so much soldering and unsoldering before things start to get ugly.

The final tune-up directions call for monitoring the current coming from the power supply, then setting the bias of the final transistor.  But my initial current is much higher  (265 mA) than what is given in the directions as being expected (95 mA).  I don’t know if that is really a bad thing or not.

The step involves turning up the current in the final transistor by increasing the bias until the power supply current increases by 40 mA.  I did that  (to 305 mA) and I’m not seeing the expected 5 watt output, more like 1 watt.

I don’t really know what this all means.   So I have been studying the schematic diagram and I’ve posted a couple of questions online.