[Today: rest day]<\/p>\n
Success!<\/p>\n
Short version:\u00a0 I cleaned up my mess and the thing works as expected.<\/p>\n
Long version:<\/p>\n
I built the thing; I had a couple of glitches along the way.\u00a0 But I was pretty sure I had it put together correctly, in the general sense.\u00a0 The last step was to tune it up and aim for 5 watts of output.\u00a0 The directions specified how to set the no-drive bias current.\u00a0 And, as you recall, my bias current was some out of whack number.<\/p>\n
So I looked it over and I pondered the schematic and I tried to take measurements.<\/p>\n
Eventually I broke down and sent a few emails out.<\/p>\n
It frequently is the case that I’ll find some elementary problem after hitting “send”.\u00a0 This time it took a bit longer.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But then I got an email back from the kit designer.\u00a0 He confirmed the numbers in the directions and that my out-of-whack reading was not within the expected range of good values.\u00a0 He suggested I take pictures of my board, front and back, and send them to him.\u00a0 I proceeded to take a video, which I will attach at the end of this post.<\/p>\n
I find the shiny soldery side to be very hard to see.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The place I had forgotten to solder was on the right-hand leg of diode D5.\u00a0 In the video at the :27 mark you can see right through the hole.\u00a0 It’s not supposed to be that way.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Following the rest of the directions, I soon had the thing putting out well over 5 watts.\u00a0 I set it at 5.14, or some such number; as close to 5 watts as I could get.<\/p>\n
It’s a win!<\/p>\n
Now I need to go back to all of my question email places and be embarrassed about having missed soldering in a component!<\/p>\n