Running full legal - advice anyone?

While I'm not a keen DX chaser, I do run the full 400 W on HF - while the sun is as spotless as it is now, you need every watt you can get.

If I hear someone I want to talk to, I like to be able to grab the mike and reply. This means I have chosen to go down the all-solid-state path. I talk into the mike, the relays in the ATU go crunch, and that's it. No whistling into the mike and tuning up.

There are expensive solutions which will do everything I want, but I'm not made of money. So, I run the TS2000X into a RM KL500 amplifier, through a filter, and watch my QRO with a Palstar WM150 PEP meter. This is not an ideal setup because:

- I'm using a linear PSU, which gives up the ghost at about 35 A peak. If I try to draw more current from it than that, it clips, the amp clips, and I'm likely suddenly to become the least popular person on 20 m without an I at the front of his callsign. (Yes, I do speak Italian, no, I don't use a speech processor)
- the Palstar is designed for US limits, it's very easy to read 1.5 kW but the two scales are 300W and 3 kW fsd. 400W is not that easy to read.
- the KL500 is only really suitable for 20m and up. It runs class AB2. Through the filter the harmonics are acceptable, -70 dBc or so, but on lower bands the harmonics go straight through the filter (which cuts off at 30 MHz) and are likely to QRM the band above the one you're using.

But it was cheap! :-)

If this were your shack, how would you improve it?

I would say that there might be a market for a simple device that would read out PEP, preferably with a digital readout, over 1.8 - 144 MHz. I don't think there are that many people running full legal at higher frequencies. This could be a niche market for a G or EI manufacturer.

As you can see at HF I have an all-black-box idiot-proof setup of legoboxes bolted together. My microwave setups are almost all homebrew, which reflects my interests. However, no-one goes up on the Downs in winter (will this winter never end?) so I have a few HF toys to play with as well as real radio.

r G8SHE

.

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