{"id":31080,"date":"2012-02-26T20:31:57","date_gmt":"2012-02-26T19:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cqdx.ru\/ham\/?p=31080"},"modified":"2023-09-24T16:11:05","modified_gmt":"2023-09-24T16:11:05","slug":"alpha-a4040-autotuner-letter-from-the-alphas-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cqdx.ru\/ham\/new-equipment\/alpha-a4040-autotuner-letter-from-the-alphas-president\/","title":{"rendered":"Alpha A4040 4KW Autotuner (Letter from the Alpha's President)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Letter from the President, Steve Farkas, WA2NFR<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m spending about eighty percent of my time on Alpha\u2019s new A4040 Autotuner.\u00a0 It\u2019s great to get back to engineering \u2013 my true love.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s picture time!<\/strong><\/div>\n

This was shot as we were assembling the first article and things look really good.\u00a0 A few holes in the wrong place, but all and all, things are looking really good for shipment at the end of the quarter.\u00a0 The tuner is very mechanical, and very heavy duty.\u00a0 In this picture you can see the two vacuum variable caps, and the Alpha designed inductor, all direct driven by the stepper motors near the bottom of the picture.\u00a0 The caps and inductors are sitting on a huge piece of Glass Epoxy board, supported by rubberized mounts so we can isolate the noisy stuff from the metal cabinet.\u00a0 The gears are driving geared potentiometers that are used to sense the position of the elements.\u00a0 Notice the silver plated flat stock wound on edge.\u00a0 I\u2019d tell you how this inductor is made \u2013 if I knew.\u00a0 Our vendor said he\u2019d have to\u2026 well suffice it to say, I told him I didn\u2019t want to know.\u00a0 We designed our own heavy duty switches and pad cap.\u00a0 You can see the three switches near the back of the unit, and the pad cap is right behind the middle capacitor.<\/p>\n

For the computing platform, we\u2019ve chosen the Beagleboard XM running Ubuntu Linux, with a custom driver board plugged into a 7? color LCD display.\u00a0 It\u2019s up and running and we\u2019re busy writing code.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re selling quickly.\u00a0 We\u2019ve already received orders for almost two hundred tuners!\u00a0 If you want to get one before Dayton, you should put your order in the system.\u00a0We\u2019re taking orders with no deposit<\/strong> necessary, so get on that list!\u00a0 As soon as we start shipping, we\u2019re going to start taking deposits to get in the queue.<\/p>\n

Over the last couple years, I\u2019ve met some of the nicest hams.\u00a0 It\u2019s a wonderful hobby, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

Steve, WA2NFR<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

See also November 24th 2011<\/span><\/a> CQDX.ru Info.<\/p>\n

4040TuningInside<\/div><\/div>
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