[Central-Electronics] 100V alignment? (Robert Nickels)

[Paul]

I did my 200V about a year ago, and recently replaced a 20 meter crystal that went dead. Before the crystal went dead I was getting about 80 watts on 20 meters. With the new crystal I'm getting a full 100 watts. You may want to check crystal activity before doing any major alignments.  
 
I have also installed Nick Tusa's 160 meter conversion so had a chance to do a "full" alignment of the 160 meter band.
 
Best way is to have a sweep generator do all the stages exactly as described in the manual. On the other hand................
 
The previous owner I received my 200V from indicated it hadn't been used for maybe 30 years or more.
 
I found that simply adjusting each bands crystal oscillator plate coil made the most improvement in full power output. Simple to peak, you don't have to concern yourself with the broadband aspects, just pick the middle of the band and tweak . Just don't be tempted to get the absolute peak power output, you'll find that at absolute peak it is quite sensitive and can drop out of oscillation unexpectedly. Just find the adjustment side that gradually increases the power output to maximum and than cuts out quickly, then back that point off by 5 watts or so on the gradual side. That 5 watts won't make any difference to your output signal but it will keep the oscillator reliably running.
 
As far as broadband adjustment goes, I did not have a sweep generator so my technique was to adjust the 1st/2nd mixer, buffer and driver stages in the middle of the band and then tweak the adjustments at each end of the band until the power output was pretty flat across the entire band. Found all my band coils were still pretty near dead on and gained very little by doing this. Even the 160 meter conversion provided by Nick required very little tweaking, once the oscillator was running everything on 160 came up fine, Nicks conversion is great!. 
 
The mixer/buffer/driver alignment took a while, it was tedious, and probably worth the effort as my 200V is pretty flat on all bands, and all bands (160 thru 15 meters) are between 90 and 100 watts output. Only 10 meters is down, about 50 watts, I still need to look into that. However, I didn't gain a huge amount by doing this alignment once the oscillators were peaked, so you might think twice about doing the whole thing unless you really believe it is far out of alignment. Unless you are real confident in playing with the broadband concept, you may lose more than you gain by getting the mixer/buffer/driver way out of alignment.
 
Good luck!
 
73, 
Paul W2EC