The accompanying paperwork describes this beast as a 5w 10m CW trasmitter!! Where did they get the itransistors would only put out 5w ? America !!! God Bless them. Don’t ask me why.I just would!!! Just 40 or 50 watts input.no need to hurt it. I don’t think the amp maker wants to go through that again but who knows…I would just like to cruise along a 2kw instead of one 1kw and know I still had 30% in reserve. A large percentage were being returned and Texas Star stand behind their product and will fix them. 3200w is a lot of power and it wouldn’t take much to go wrong fry a bunch of transistors. They are all blown up! I can only assume they were overdriven to buggery on AM. Apparently they worked well under all test in the workshop but the return rate was horrendous. They mentioned that they had been having quite a few requests for this amp and were considering it but had not come to a decision yet. Texas star used to make a 16 tranistor amplifier the DX3200 and I did ask them if they would make one for me. Better to adjust the drive and let the amp loaf along than to strangle it with the dial a watt control.
You can also dial a watt with the front mounted potentiometer but I have yet to see that pot last very long when you start using it like that. The compact X version has them all at the back. It has always been a problem to find somewhere to place the larger sweet sixteen with the side located coaxial plugs. Texas Star assured me the DX1600 is more efficient so perhaps less heat, or perhaps less power! No doubt about it, the DX1600x is a nice looking amp and pretty compact. The sweet sixteen has more heatsink area and 4 fans so one would think it should run cooler in a showdown.
The DX1600X has an internal fan that blows into the components and out over the heatsink fins at the bottom of the amplifier. Program for the next few days is to check the antennas together, change the balun of the lfa and remove the tet so the lfa is on its own. I can’t say it is any quieter that the TET at this stage because I am not really noticing much difference noise wise. Every test so far has had the lfa ahead by at least a couple of S points. Both antenna are fed with the same type of balun and I think we may need to change the balun on the lfa to a coaxial cable air wound type or a 1:1 current type which we have on hand. (we know how the tet was doing on its own) We may see an increase in bandwidth. We will need to remove the tet and see how the lfa does on its own swr wise. Both antennas are experiencing interaction and the swr on the tet has increased markedly since the lfa went up under it. TET Emtron holds the bandwidth over 4mhz under 2:1. Results so far show the LFA to have about 2 S points over the TET…BUT…the LFA has a very sharp bandwidth…about a mhz max.move out of that and things go downhill quickly. LFA is longer with 5 elements loop driven on 8m boom. TET has dual driven elements on a 6 meter boom. 6 el TET emtron at 38m and 5 el LFA at 32.5m on tower