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Reviews For: TREMENDUS II

Category: Amplifiers: RF Power - HF & HF+6M

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Review Summary For : TREMENDUS II
Reviews: 2MSRP: 2.500$
Description:
HF AMPLIFIER
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.ulvin.com
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0021.5
EA4AZZ Rating: 2008-11-14
bad desing bad amp Time Owned: more than 12 months.
Internal chaos, not swr, over drive, temperature, plate current grid current protecction....nothing
Bad relays......you can melt the relays.
Bad bad cooling..and poor materials.
The most horrible amp that I ever had.
I sold 5 years ago.and I sleep well.
Poor materials poor desing and.big big price...more expensive that a ACOM 1000 state of the art desing.
GM7CXM Rating: 2005-02-08
OK amp Time Owned: 6 to 12 months.
I have waited almost a year to write this review due to the problems I had at the beginning with this amp, and wanted to be able to give it a fair review over a longer period of time.

The purchase of this amp was a fairy tale. Cutting a long story short, my wife, through some mutual friends and colleagues, organised the surprise purchase of a second-hand Tremendus II, managing the handover from its previous owner in a skilful and jaw-dropping fashion as only my dear wife is able. Unfortunately the joy was short lived since when I got home and plugged it in, after half an hour it did a huge flashover and burnout and promptly died on the spot, without me having even plugged in the coax, let alone apply RF to it. It later appears this was due to a damaged tube auto-oscillating. Several months of heartache followed, the previous seller being a known and respected member of the ham community, I ended up getting the amp fixed at the manufacturers and the seller paid for the most part of the repair. This is the first and only time this has happened to me and it was most distressing for several reasons, first the mutual latent distrust between the seller and myself, later cleared up, then the distrust with the manufacturer who did not provide circuit diagrams to allow anyone else to attempt a repair, and who charged a lot of money to do it himself (warranted or not, a lot of money over and above the purchase price, in fact almost the same again).

I have to say though, in all fairness to Ulvin, that when the amp finally arrived, it did so in perfect working order, with a new pair of chinese 3-500Zs, and has been working fine ever since. The unit is solidly built, but the fan is noisy. It is a blower fan, not a sucker, so the hot air is blown all around the inside of the casing before being expelled from the well-ventilated cabinet. It puts out our legal 800w pep on the higher bands with less than 40w input, this low drive from my Icom 765 and the fact that unit is loafing at this power (no more than 40-50 mA grid current) makes for a nice clean output, no RFI on my TV and just a bit on the cordless telephone. We shall see when we move to a city centre location later this year.

All in all the amp gets a "fair" rating when taking into consideration it's cost, manufacturer service, power output, and noisiness. If I had known at the time all the hassle and money it was going to be, I'd have bought an Acom 1000 without thinking twice. Had I not had the hassle in the beginning, I'd think I'd be more satisfied.