[hpsdr] pico-psu 120 report

[w3sz at epix.net]

Hello, All,

I used the picopsu-120 with the SDR-1000 and Atlas/Ozy/Janus for the ARRL VHF contest this weekend.  I powered things up at 9 am Saturday and everything stayed powered up until 7 pm Sunday when a very active local electrical storm caused a transient power outage, shortly after I observed lightening occurring BELOW me down in the valley.  At that point I decided to quit ;)

The combination ran with no problems throughout that 34 hour time period and the picopsu-120 did not feel hot to touch.  I was contesting and not looking for little spurs on the spectrum display, but I can say that there were no spurs that affected my SSB operations.  I did not use this combination for CW and can't say what the result would have been in that sphere.

The picopsu-120 was a quick way to get up and running, and has the advantage of taking up zero table-space.  At some point if I ever get around to 'boxing' the unit I may include a linear supply in the box, but for now this combination is simple, inexpensive, and compact and so I am using it.  My 'Pandora' consisted of a piece of duct tape to hold the unit in one place on a corner of the operating table.  I thought it looked really sharp ;)  Even though there was absolutely no shielding of the Atlas/Ozy/Janus combo, I had no problems with RF affecting the Ozy/Janus combo, perhaps because I only put out 180-200 W on 144 MHz and less power on all the other bands.

So far I've used the pico-psu 120 with Ozy/Atlas for about 100 hours with no problems identified.

But by all means, use whatever power supply technique you have and prefer.  There is NO perfect solution for everyone, as each of us has different priorities and resources.  The
important thing is to power it up and use it in a way that is satisfactory to you, early and often;  the means of achieving that is secondary.  So this is a report and and an
encouragement to power up and get on the air and use the Atlas/Ozy/Janus combo, and not a recommendation of specifically how to do that.

73,

W3SZ
Roger Rehr
http://www.nitehawk.com/w3sz