[AMRadio] Henry 5 K

[Bernie Doran]

I have gotten tired of looking at my Henry 5K and it is now for sale at $4,000.  It is low hour, I can check, but last I looked it was about 600 hours on the hour meter.   It operates as Henry designed, but there are in my opinion several things wrong with the design.   Once turned on the HV remains on and produces a lot of heat. Appears it was intended for SSB operators that are unable to produce a sentance of more than three of four words. A relay in the primary of the High Voltage can fix that. It clearly needs a soft start, easy fix with a few surge limiters. The big issue is the filament transformer Henry chose the cheap route and used a buck boost transformer with a series resistor in the primary to adjust the voltage. The filament voltage regulation for the 3CX1200As is simply terrible, and once I found that, I simply quit using it untill I could fix it, still sitting and waiting. 3CX1200As are very tough tubes( $1,000 each) but do not deserve to be abused like that. Henry also placed the tube filamants in series, as they apparently did not know how to design a 30 ampere filamant choke.   Best way to take care of that is rewind the buck boost transformer,find a 15 Volt transformer, use another buck boost to actually control the primary voltage, or use a variac in the filament transformer primary. That might be tough to mount .   I can make these changes if someone is interested, should not be terribly expensive.   I used it on 80 and 40 meters and it will do an very easy 3500 watt carrier.  4400 volts at 1.25 amp!. I also believe that it could use a significient increase in the size of the filter capacitors. 

I bet you never heard of what I consider issues, everyone seems to think these were designed and built by God!
Do not waste my time with offers, will ship anywhere, but I am aware of the numerous scams, any check will take untill the local bank has their funds in hand. This will not be sold to cbers.   Bernie W8RPW