Lately I’ve been mostly operating on a few nets on 80 and 40 meters. Running 100w I often hear reports that my signal is pretty weak, so I thought maybe I should add an amplifier to my setup. The problem with that, was that my coax was less than ideal. It was mostly RG-58 and RG-8X running to the wire loop antenna. Fortunately, I had RG-8 running from the shack all the way to the tri-band beam. Also, my antenna tuner was only good for 200W.
So the first steps I took was to run all new RG-213 coax from the shack to the loop antenna. And I ordered an LDG-600ProII antenna tuner.
I also upgraded all the jumper coaxes in the shack to RG-213 and labeled each end with Dymo heat shrink tubing which really made hooking it all up a breeze and will help in the future if I need to disconnect anything.
Next I installed a dedicated 20A 120VAC circuit to power the amplifier. I debated about making it 240V but I already had 12-2 Romex and an extra 20A circuit breaker, and I knew I was going to be getting a kilowatt amplifier.
Now I just needed the amplifier.
About 6 months ago I had talked to a gentleman that had an Ameritron ALS-600S solid state amplifier for sale, at a price I liked. But I didn’t buy it. And I regretted it. So I thought, what the heck, shoot him an email, he might still have it. And he did! So I bought it, and he even delivered it right to my front door. What a deal!
So now I’m running 400-500 watts with about 50w of drive power. Nice!
