Sorry Axel I guess I dropped a zero when I typed 30.? Still a capacitor in the hundreds range is terrible and a good capacitor should be 10 times that or more. The capacitor I use in my magloop has a Q factor of 5000 for example.? Many people use the poor plastic dielectric variables designed for tuning AM transistor radios of the '70s in antenna tuners and are happy making tons of QSO's.? Losing power in your tuner and transmission line does not mean you will not make contacts.? You will, and go ahead and get on the air with whatever you can manage.? As someone pointed out, even if you lost 50% of your transmitted power, your signal would be received 3db down from what it could be, and that is only half an S unit.? If you really get into QRPp and want to start working at 100mw or less, then you start to consider the crazy stuff like those precious milliwatts. Otherwise just go build something and have fun!
On Sun, Apr 7, 2019 at 12:47 AM, Joe Street wrote:
"polyvaricon" AM tuning capacitors (with a Q factor of about 30! according to W7ZOI's tests)
I worry about this, because using other tuning capacitors than these would be difficult ("big"). I did a search for W7ZOI's test and found this . According to page 19, he measured Q = 540 at 10 MHz and Q = 340 at 6.5 MHz. Can I relax or is a the value of 30 still right?
