[BC] RE: FM Power Amplifiers

[tpt at literock93r.com]

 From comments, I am leaning towards Armstrong, but my distributor  
hasn't gotten prices from them yet. Probably since we are still in the  
holiday dead zone.

As to $$$, some listed prices are up into the >20K range.  There's a  
2003 Nautel 3.5 on the used market for $22, (which would have to be  
re-tuned, though).

A new Nautel would be nice, but hard to justify the extra dollars for  
a 5, just to run it at half-power.  This is a Class A 138 meters above  
average, so we just don't need that much power (2450 watts TPO). It's  
also one of 3 FM's licensed to a town of 5,000, so billing is not all  
that great.  Our other FM really carries it.

 From other questions, we are looking at solid state because there are  
so few tube transmitters made in this power range anymore. Besides, I  
doubt we would save that much on the initial price to justify having  
to purchase new tubes every so often.
(Although we had almost 3 years on the 5CX1500B in the 2.5 H before  
this failure; tube still putting out full power the day before the  
plate loading cap failed).
We're in coal country, power savings from eliminating that 5 volt room  
heater, while nice, are not that significant.

Also, most solid state models provide a certain amount of redundancy,  
failure of a module merely means reduced-power operation until the  
failed module is repaired.