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Reviews For: Heatherlite

Category: Amplifiers: RF Power - 6M/VHF/UHF+

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Review Summary For : Heatherlite
Reviews: 1MSRP: 850
Description:
4CX350A 144MHz amplifier, manufactured in Beverly, North East England.
Product is in production
More Info:
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0012
GW4RWR Rating: 2002-05-05
Poor build quality Time Owned: more than 12 months.
This amp introduced me to valves, and the 300W out on 144MHz certainly makes weak signal working mush easier.

Strong assembly using crinkle-finished steel. Plastic front panel. Aluminium plate line, grounded at the cold end. Slow motion geared anode tuning. Grid swamped by adequate resistors to prevent instability, at the expense of increasing the drive necessary for full output. Single meter, switched to display screen current, anode current or relative output power.

Complaints:

The screen supply was unregulated. Not even a string of zeners was included.

Despit the impressive finishing, many of the components inside were unsatisfactory. Two orange anode blocking capacitors, with leads rather than nut/bolt connection. Belling-lee connectors (as used on your television set) carried the drive into the grid compartment! The valve base did not include the built-in screen decoupling capacitor. Rather it was an HF base, but I experienced no problems with the external decoupling used.

I handed this amp over to my neighbour. He's had more problems...flashover, the screen connection once came off. On another occasion, a station many miles away called in to complain about the signal...the screen supply smoothing capacitor had failed open circuit, feeding raw DC to the valve!