[ARC5] If You Want To Get Some "UMPH" for Your Rigs...

[David Stinson]

I'm overcoming my greed so I can send you this "heads-up." ;-)

If you've ever wondered how to get on the air with a QRP-power
boatanchor, such as light aircraft rigs which typically run 4-5 watts
of AM and still get heard, the obvious answer is an external amp.

There is a gentleman here in Texas who is listing 
Motorola Triton 40-S 150 watt HF SSB marine radios,
which are programmable for fixed channels from 2-18 MC,
 for dirt cheap- $25 if you just want the amp, 
$50 for the whole radio which includes a large portion of the shipping.
He's listing them for the included amps only.  These amps will,
with minimal fiddling, deliver 100-150 watts with next-to-nothing drive.
You can drive this thing to half output with a cheap signal generator.
It has common connectors for in-and-out, plus built-in SWR protection.
Tune up your little rig into a load so it sounds good, then tap
off 10 mW and you get full output.  Easy as pie.

I bought two of the radios from the gentleman.
He packed them very well and they arrived quickly.
Both arrived in good shape, included the mounting brackets
and, with a little cleaning of the switches/pots, 
both of  them work well.
I hooked my dummy load up to the antenna output and
fed a cheap sig gen into the PA IN RCA connector.
Selected a 4 MC freq, closed the PTT contact
and drove the amp to 75 watts carrier out.
The amp is speced for twice that or more,
but that's all the drive I had handy.
The rigs had WWV at 5 and 10 MC programmed and
they sounded good on a piece of wire.
Output looked nice and clean.  
Components are first-rate, USA made 1980s stuff.

I intend to bring out the PA IN, RX Ant out and PTT leads,
leaving the rest of the radio intact, using the pre-programmed
channels as a "band switch" to switch the output filters.

This gentleman is listing two more at:
http://cgi.ebay.com/_W0QQitemZ120115999617

If no one grabs them by tomorrow night, I will.
Shipping weight for two radios is 49 pounds.
He uses FedEx.  

73 Dave S.

P.S. The amp will put out good power all the way 
down below 160 meters, but I have not yet checked
the filter performance on that band.  Since these rigs
had 2186 as a primary distress channel, it's a good
bet that 160 performance will be good.



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