Dear Elecraft reflectorees.... I have received some good (private) replies to my query about the need for accuracy and I've learned a lot about how other think.
Shown below is one reply that I feel is worth sharing. I'm not an engineer, so I found this to be especially enlightening. I assume some (many?) will cry sacrilege, but since this is not me speaking, don't yell at me. I'm only the piano player! [snip] I do have to chuckle when I read about these accurate measurements on a Bird wattmeter. Back in the 80's when I was involved with RF generators, we used Bird slugs in the power monitoring section. We used a calorimeter to calibrate the slugs. It was not uncommon to have the slugs off by as much as 60%! We had a box of over 200 slugs that were too far off to try to calibrate. We threw them out. Should have saved then and sold them at Ham fests. Would have been a good laugh when someone said they checked their power with a Bird meter. Had one customer who called and bitched that his new 13.56MHZ 15KW generator was putting out only 12KW at max power. He had tried two new Birds and they read the same thing. Since we designed the 15KW generators to run continuous at 18KW, we took our 13.56MHZ 20KW calibrated Bird to the customer. We showed him that at the 15KW setting it was putting out 15KW and that when at maximum as he was checking it, it was putting out 18KW. He was embarrassed with his new Birds. [end snip] Comments? de Doug KR2Q _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com