[Hallicrafters] BA's at Field Day

[Mike Everette]

I took my recently-restored National HRO receiver and a WRL Globe Scout 65A/Heathkit VF-1 combo to work CW on 80 and 40 meters.

And I learned a valuable lesson.

BE CAREFUL with BA's around generators.

The generator we used had some sort of problem.  Nobody had a line frequency meter and I suspect the gen-set could have been running slow.  The voltage output was OK, but the frequency could have been off.  Or, it may have had a some kind of phase problem.  That is, it nay have been generating more than one waveform resulting in a much higher peak voltage output.  My AC voltmeter (never leave home without it) "said" 125 volts was coming down the #12 gauge line, but I'm not so sure that was a true reading.

SOMETHING was REAL wrong.

At any rate, I came real close to cooking off the power transformer in the HRO, as well as that in the transmitter, after a couple of hours in operation.  The HRO power supply case was EXTREMELY hot and remained so for
several hours after shut-down; fortunately this was a mil-spec supply instead of the usual "doghouse" unit which would have never survived.  I don't think the transmitter was damaged, but am not yet sure.

The other guys with the super-zot-ray SDR Ikensu rice-burner gear attributed their power-supply heating to the 97-degree ambient temperature.  Uh-huh....

I shut my stuff completely down after discovering this and didn't get back on the air, much to the disappointment of a number of folks in the club who were looking for me to "make" their club's score on CW -- there are no other CW ops in this crowd (!!!) though several claim to "want to learn code."

I have been told that Honda generators are nototious for phase problems.  One of the generators we had was a Honda; I'm not sure what the other one was.

BE WARNED.

73

Mike
WA4DLF



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