[Elecraft] Elecraft KPA1500

[Howard Hoyt]

>>A 1.5 KW, RTTY capable 160 - 6 Meter Amp,
>>WITH an Antenna Tuner AND priced
>>around $5K would sell like hotcakes.

I'm like a lot of other hams who are fortunate/hard working enough to be able to afford the Elecraft K-line, and know two who have already augmented their full K-lines with Acom2000s.  They both stated if Elecraft had an amp that did legal limit they would have bought Elecraft instead.  I suspect there are several thousand K-line owners who are the same, including me, I have recently been looking at the Acom myself for the same reason but don't happen to have $7k in my wallet at the moment.  I love the inherent integration Elecraft designs into it's K-line and would buy a KPA1500 in a minute in the $5k range.

One request: I own a KPA500 and it's fan/jet engine exhaust is far too loud for quiet shack use when contesting.  The decision to use a high head-pressure tunnel sink design was made early in the design process to keep the case size down, and it performs very well with the exception of the inescapable noise.  I know others have installed quieter fans, but an analysis of air-flow will show them incapable of the same degree of cooling.  I have been designing cooling solutions for industrial systems for years and if you study fan manufacturer's CFM/pressure curves, you find there is a pretty invariant relationship between a fan's ability to maintain CFM into back pressure and it's noise with today's fan designs, regardless of brand or blade shape.

If and when Elecraft designs a KPA1500, I suggest multiple slower-spinning, quiet 120mm fans be considered to keep noise to a minimum, as opposed to multiple small higher-RPM fans which can make more noise.  Alternatively a heavily baffled air flow path such as the Acom uses (but which takes space) can offer adequate noise reduction.  This is an initial design criterion which dictates heatsink design and case layout...but Elecraft's engineers know all that stuff.

Just my $0.02,

Howie - WA4PSC