I am a proud owner of this amp for one month. I also own the HF-Auto tuner and it works slick. I am a contester and have used this amp tuner combo in a RTTY and SSB contest running 800 watts SSB and 400 watts RTTY with no problems.
this past weekend I was operating the ARRL CW SS contest and only on 80 mtrs I could not keep the amp operating while trying to send the 7 seconds of report. No other band had this problem of kicking into bypass before I could transmit the entire report. SWR was reading 1.1 on the amp and 1.06 :1 on the HF-Auto. After the contest I ran tests into my dummy load to eliminate the chance it was the antenna or feed line. I do not have a lightning protector in line.
same problem existed. After calling Palstar and discussing the problem Mark sent me a software upgrade. The fact that this problem only occurs on 80 mtrs and into a dummy load as well as to the antenna via the tuner was a new one for Mark.
After installing the new firmware I ran the same test and found an improvement which was everything work as expected up to 500’watts now butt try to go higher and after 8!seconds of transmitting a certain signal the amp tripped into the Bypass mode.
has anyone else experienced anything like this?
Alan- W1BQ
