[BC] RE: FM Power Amplifiers

[Mike McCarthy]

There is also something to be said of MTBF.  A used box has already used up 
the best MTBF.

That said, the used Nautel FM would be a good deal IF the original channel 
is in the same "range" as your channel.  Nautel's combiners in that series 
operated in three ranges due to jumper cable length differences.  The box 
is the same otherwise across the band. Changing bands is probably not a 
cost effective thing to do however.

None the less,  I would strongly suggest letting the factory retune/proof 
the box even if it's in the same range. Then you have the OEM data to go on 
in the future.

HOWEVER, I'm not a fan of the British made exciter used in that 
series.  Keep your FX50 and you'll have the best sounding station on the dial.

MM

At 06:47 AM 1/5/2008 -0600, tpt at literock93r.com wrote


> 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.