I have no background history of the why of Labor Day other than to recognize the strength of one of the greatest US assets, its people and the labor movement. It was the projection of that special resource during WWII that made the US "THE" world leader.
An article today on the internet, suggests a view that the world leader has shifted to China. A questionable view but a somewhat nagging view since the internally it appears to be we are now a nation dedicated to partisan fighting and revenge politics.
But today I want to focus on homebrew and supply a little bit more "labor" to Hybrid Wireless project. It was hot in the garage lab yesterday so just a small amount of work where I built the rear panel for the integrated power supply. I still need to add the octal socket that will be used for the Hybrid Wireless power cable connection which will be located above and slightly to the right of the fuse.
A blog reader taking advantage of AI prepared and sent to me a design for the 540 VDC supply that used no power transformer. Now this was interesting as I immediately thought of a 450VDC power supply used in a ham rig in the 1960's that used no transformer, more on that later.
The AI design starts with a 48VDC switching power supply and then using a booster circuit ups the output to 540 VDC. I can see the merit of such a circuit being light weight, small size and great efficiency. There was some definite rationale in going from 48 to 540 a 11X boost versus a 12 volt which would be 45X boost.
I have the transformer and most of the circuitry is in place and only need the addition of the bridge rectifier (Four 1N4007's), the 100Ufd @ 600 VDC electrolytic cap and a 30K 10-watt resistor to complete the supply. BTW AI even prepared a BOM with part sources.
Now back to the 450VDC no transformer power supply. The rig was the SBE-33 that took the 115 VAC mains input and using a voltage quadrupling scheme (no transformer, only diodes and caps) to produce the plate supply for the 27GB5 Finals. Want to go mobile... a 12VDC to 115VAC inverter. That was 62 years ago. BUT it was also a shock hazard and an NE-2 on the back panel told you when you had to reverse the two-pin power plug.
Them that know can make it go.
Noteworthy many Americans think ICE and DHS are our greatest assets today because of the touted "millions" of illegal aliens that have been deported. That begs the question of the metrics being used to assess greatness as a nation. Such metrics would likely not list deportations as being the top criteria.
73's
Pete N6QW