I forgot to post this over a year ago…
So we were working on the old Continental Electronics 816R that sadly later got nuked by the Carr Fire when we heard a voice come out of the power amplifier.
Uhhh, FM transmitters don’t usually do that.
In addition it kept arcing plate voltage to ground with an irritating snapping sound and restarting repeatedly so it needed some work.
Uh-oh!
The harmonic filter is a very, uh, Googie looking thing. Steve Wilde at American Amplifier Technologies rebuilds these.
The units at left and right are the tuning and loading paddle motors. Oh, and a roll of Bounty. Or maybe sparkle. I don’t know.
More burn marks on the loading paddle. We just buffed these out.
It’s recommended to remove these selenium transient protectors and yeet them out of the rig. They’re failure prone and not all that necessary.
This motorized pot controls the transmitter power set point. It was sticking and had to be freed up. Ehhhh, what’s another hour of overtime up the mountain *groan*
The big SCRs used for plate voltage control…. These transmitters use a really neat variable plate supply that I wish most other high power tube rigs had.
Dirty rectifier stacks
Inspecting the filament variac
Yeah, it’s another one of those motorized variac things. The magnetic brake is odd. I don’t recall how it worked but I had to blow the dust out of it.
One arcy sparky, two arcy sparky, three arcy sparky, ah ha ha!
This was a neat monster. It’s been replaced with a remarkably boring Nautel NVlt solid state transmitter about 50% its size and 20% its weight. It’d still be rocking up there if not for the pesky fire melting it down!!
+100 for the Googie reference