teckniqs wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 9:30 am I think Barney moved up to the West Midlands, or at least he was around that area 2004-2005 the last time when I heard WNKR (on 6.285MHz).

Albert H wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 7:53 pm Hugo once told Barney (in The 7 Scars, as I recall), that his station should be called West And North Kent Electric Radio.....

Hugo and Legless Lurch famously tried and beheaded Justin Simmonds on the air for "Interfering with a much nicer radio station". I think that I've got it on tape somewhere:

Judge (Les): "You stand accused of interfering with a much nicer radio station. How do you plead?"

Justin (Hugo): "Sycophantically, your honour!"

Is Hugo still around?

Albert H wrote: ↑Tue Mar 19, 2019 12:38 am Trancetechnic: I've seen those boards before - they're a very bad copy of an old Broadcast Warehouse board! At least Roger had a clue about screening and filtering and wouldn't use an S18 coil in the output of a 150Watt PA.

As I recall, JD and SM had a load of those boards etched by a PCB company in Wimbledon (I seem to remember). They had "simplified" the layout, without being aware of the ramifications and without the right test gear to detect and sort out the problems. They made loads of those PAs and sold them to lots of stations who couldn't understand why they kept getting raided......

There were two versions on the same PCB - the one you've got, and another with a BLF244 driver. Neither of them worked properly. I received two of the BLF244 boards in rigs from a station just north of London, who couldn't understand why they were causing interference to their local cab company..... I connected my signal generator, a dummy load and a regulated bench supply and spectrum analysed what was coming out of it:

The drive was on 94.2MHz, and there were two small spurs in the aircraft band, loads of second and third harmonic, a few other spurs in Band I and lots of "noise" around the carrier. By fitting screening in the right places, the 2nd and 3rd almost completely disappeared. Adding a bit of base damping to the final and correcting the match into the driver got rid of the spurs and close-in noise. I found that the output match was poor - they'd got a couple of capacitors wrong when they copied the original and Roger probably fitted the S18 to fool the copiers. Correcting the values, removing the S18 and fitting the correct coil, the current consumption decreased and the power output increased - the efficiency increased significantly, and the heatsink was much cooler.

I reassembled the whole rig, fixed the nasty synthesiser whine, and it was doing about 145 clean Watts and staying cool. Fixing the other one only took about 20 minutes!