[AMRadio] Legal limit

[L L bahr]

I love operating AM using old boatanchor rigs.  What I find disturbing to me today is the fact many hams are using or want to use linear amps with their transmitters either being rice boxes or things like Globe Scouts or DX-60s etc. They do not seem to know how to tune their amps or really don't care to know how to tune them.  (If they knew anything at all, they would realize their amp will buy them very little if anything).  Yet they do it and the numbers are growing.  It seems they only care how far they can "swing the numbers" on their Dosey meter!  

Out of it all comes a couple disturbing things.  1) They sound like hell and 2) They are giving AM a bad name with all their splatter up and down the band.  That hurts all of us as it gives the SSB community just cause to dislike AMers. 

Have fun with your small Gonset Commander or with your Collins KW-1 as is.  Use them as they were intended and use your SB-220 on your SSB rig.  As others have said, you will hardly tell the difference if any running a Heathkit DX-100 with high level modulation compaired to one driving an amp.  That is, if you have your amp tuned up correctly.

Of course non of this will make sense to most of the ham population today.  It's all about me and the hell with the next guy.  Never mind running my station using good engineering practices.  Besides, I don't know what they are anyway and I am not smart enough to know fact from fiction. 

Lee, w0vt
Houston