Tag Archives: blf188xr

Construction, Ham Radio

1kW 144MHz Amp Lives!

Those of you who have been following my 144 MHz 1kW amplifier project (previous posts machining heatsinks, soldering transistor down and building the pallet) will, I’m sure, be delighted to hear that I have had life out of the amplifier. In excess of 1 kW, I hasten to add!

The amplifier was able to maintain in excess of 1000W for over 2 minutes.  At this point, the Bird dummy-load started to get a bit warm, so a longer test was abandoned. The amplifier pallet, however, remained cool enough to touch. As the F1JRD original design notes, the 10-Ohm coax balun does become hot (Lionel suggests around 120C at 1kW with no cooling). I, however, used a small fan running slowly to provide a gentle draft which greatly reduced the balun heat.

The next step is to add the Dallas-Maxim DS18B20 temperature sensor – the idea is to have the sensor buried into the pallet next to the transistor, to measure the copper heat spreader temperature.

Construction, Ham Radio

Soldering Expensive Transistors

This morning, Royal Mail delivered me a parcel from Jim W6PQL all the way from California, USA. It took a couple of days to clear customs, but it arrived within about 5 days of being ordered. If you followed my previous post on this subject, about machining heatsinks, you’ll know that the last transistor I had failed on the testbench. You’ll also know that the copper heat-spreader was re-machined to suit the new PCB. This is why the heat-spreader has a few extra holes. Seeking advice from veteran microwave DXers & constructor (G4BAO, G4DDK, G8KBV, et al.) I was instructed to solder the device down. I watched a few of Jim W6PQL’s videos on soldering LDMOS parts to the copper heat-spreaders and replicated his instruction as closely as possible. You can see Jim’s instruction video here.

A small length of thin leaded 60/40 solder was made into a wiggle for the length of the transistor and placed in the groove previously machined in the head-spreader. I liberally applied flux to the bottom of the groove and the underside of the transistor and then sandwiched  the solder in between.

The copper heat-spreader was placed on the electric infrared hotplate and heat applied. The black dot is used to allow a laser thermometer to monitor the copper temperature. NB: this method didn’t work well.

The next two images show the solder has melted and the excess squidged out the sides. It’s clear to see when the solder has melted, since the the transistor drops. It is advised to move/slide the transistor in the molten solder to remove any voids and any excess solder. I immediately killed the heat and removed the spreader from the hotplate and placed it on a heatsink. It only took a couple of minutes to cool to a temperature I could handle, and I checked the location of the transistor against the PCB mounting holes.

The PCBs were finally mounted as a test fit. I will populate the boards before mounting them. Unlike the original jrd1 boards, these PCBs do not need to be soldered down. This means the boards can be soldered up and then mounted.

Stay tuned for more updates…

Construction, Ham Radio

Machining Heatsinks for QRO Amplifiers

Back at the 2012 Friedrichshafen Hamfest I brought a 1.25 kiloWatt VHF amplifier kit for 144 MHz from F1JRD and F5CYS. These devices were fairly new at the time. It took me a year to pluck up the courage to build the pallet, but I went about it all wrong. With the help of Dad and the kitchen hob, we soldered the jrd1 Teflon PCB to the C110 copper heat-spreader as suggested in the Dubus article (see here). I had the pallet working at the time, giving around 600W of RF, which was about the maximum my 1000W 50V PSU was capable of sustaining. When I came to boxing the device up into an amplifier to use with EME and Meteor Scatter in late 2016, the part failed under test.

After much deliberation, I have ordered parts to repair the amplifier project. I found Jim W6PQL‘s website (see here) a wealth of information, and Jim also offers to supply parts and designs to help others. I ordered a set of PCBs to replace the original jrd1 board, a NXP/Ampleon BLF188XR 1400W part to replace the failed the Freescale/NXP MRFE6VP61K25H 1250W part, and some other accessories that Jim sells. The parts were posted by Jim today, so I decided it was time to recover parts from the old PCB and recondition the heatsink and heat-spreader.

The first step was to remove the jrd1 board from the copper heat-spreader. I used the kitchen hob to heat the copper heat-spreader, since the old board was soldered to the copper block. The board damage was sustained to enable the removal of the more expensive components.

Below, the heat-spreader with the jrd1 board removed. I used a solder sucker and scraper to remove as much of the molten solder.

Once the heat-spreader had cooled down, I mounted the copper spreader up in the milling machine read to re-machine the top and bottom surfaces. Great care was taken to level the block using parallels. Below you can see the fly-cutting process on the first cut, removing just 0.05mm from the surface.

With the top and bottom of the head-spreader machined flat, a small end-mill cutter was used to machine the transistor slot to the correct depth following the skimming of the top surface. Then the heatsink mating surface was machined. Below you see the first cut on the heatsink.

The finished parts. A few machining marks, but the surfaces are perfectly good enough. Some dents on the copper block, but it’s not worth removing all of the material to eliminate these.  Using a few drips of water as a substitute for thermal compound, the two mating surfaces stick together very well (with a good vacuum forming). That’s more than good enough for my needs!

Now I just need to wait for the parts to arrive before I can finalise the PCB and transistor mounting! This story continues here: Soldering Expensive Transistors.