[ARC5] BC-AS-230 Transmitter Follies, Part 1

[Ben Hall]

Good afternoon all,

This will be quick - a certain 9-year old boy is wanting to go out into 
the garage to fiddle and tinker with stuff.  ;)

Check-out of the BC-230 went swimmingly.  I didn't find any obviously 
bad capacitors, bad resistors, or any hacked wiring.

Last week, I built up a phantom-antenna / dummy load consisting of a 
5-ohm wire-wound resistor in series with a 100pF door-knob cap.  At some 
point I will replace the wire-wound resistor with something 
non-inductive, but I figured for my testing, this was 'close-nuff.

This morning, I installed four of my tube adapters with 6AQ5's installed 
and built up a temporary harness that would allow the set to transmit in 
CW mode.

After a break for lunch, I turned on the +12VDC supply, let the heaters 
warm up, turned on my variable B+ supply, let it heat up, and slowly 
ramped the voltage up.  I was delighted to see RF output on the scope, 
antenna current indicated on the meter, a frequency output in the 5 MHz 
region (which is appropriate for the coil set installed) on the counter, 
and a nice-looking sine wave on the scope.  :)

I max'ed the antenna coupling control and got the nerve to up the B+ to 
250 VDC.  At 250 VDC, the antenna current meter was reading 0.6 amps of 
RF and 400 Vp-p on the scope with a nice looking sine wave.  (note that 
I'm not real trusting of that 400 Vp-p measurement - seems wacky to me)

At some point I'll get up to the 300 to 350 VDC suggested in the manual. 
  But for now, I'm happy to know it is working as-is w/o any repairs or 
tweaking needed.

thanks much and 73,
ben, kd5byb