Notes on my completion of the PA100-D

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Notes on my completion of the PA100-D

Postby KD1NA » 13 Aug 2012 01:27

Juha and Matti,
Last month i ordered and received one of your PA100-D kits. This e-mail will convey my experiences and issues in assembling the kit.

First off let me inform you that the PA100-D is fully operational and has met my total expectations.

I was quite satisfied with the quality of the components and design of the amplifier. The documentation, though sparse, provided me enough information needed to get everything together. The pictorial procedure to both winding the toroidal coils on the main board and the construction instructions on the PA board were very good and well documented. The parts lists as well as the printed circuit board layout documents gave me a good road map to where everything goes. Your schematic drawings are very good quality and easy to follow.

I will state that this kit is not for the beginner and in fact it would be safe to say that over 50% of the hams in the United States would lack the skills to assemble your kit. Having said that I will say after completing your PA100-D kit I have a great amount of pride in the fact that I built this unit and it performs so well.

My surface mount experience is limited and at first I was clearly struggling to properly getting the components mounted. After completing the control board ( I chose the most challenging board first ) I started to get very comfortable working with surface mounted components. It was the small resistors that was most challenging.

Construction issues:
The PA Board;
The copper wire that was to make the ground connection and also assembling L3 was missing and in it's place was a small spool of solder.

The brass cores that make up transformer T1 on the PA board were not the same diameter. One was 0.3 mm too large diameter and wouldn't slip into it's core. I machined it down to make it fit and it is working fine.

The front panel board's holes that pass the push-button switches were too small and caused the buttons to bind after mounting the panel on the control board. I enlarged the holes about 1mm now the buttons pass through freely.

On the PA board the Z1 and Q4 components were very hard to read the printing on the components even under very high magnification. We had the same problem on the Main board with Z1 and TR1. A suggestion is to tape the component's package to a small piece of paper with it's identification written on it. On some packages containing multiple devices you often had labels attached so no problem even though reading the actual component's number was near imposable.

Another observation is you refer to transistors as Q1 or Q2 on the PA and control board parts list and schematic, but list them as TR1 and TR2 on the main board parts list and schematics. I had no problem with this but this could lead to less experienced builders.

Overall the kit was fun to build and the end product works quite well. For your information I am driving the linear with an Elecraft KX3.

I will copy this e-mail to your e-mail forum as well as to the Elecraft forum for everyone's information. You make a great product.

73
Dave KD1NA
KD1NA
 
Posts: 13
Joined: 25 Jul 2012 21:03
Location: USA

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