News Flash: Henry Eats Teflon... film at 11
 

Well, I am at it again... Came up with a new idea for the tuneable
elements of an antenna matcher while awake at 3AM...(I think it it
was the tomato sauce)
After thinking about it for a few days I cobbled up the device... Put
up a half wave, end fed, 20 meter vertical and attached said device...
Tuned it up with the antenna analyzer - nice 1:1... Put power to it
with the MK-V... Nice and flat across the band... Fired up the Henry
(which has a bad track record of eating things that are fed to it)...
Tuned it up and it was idling along at 700-800 watts and everything
seemed fine, soooo put the lash to it (4100 volts at 0.800 amps)...
OOPs!

Say did you know that teflon contains carbon black? I mean lots of
carbon, like thick clouds of it?... Hmm, apparently the RF voltage
across a tapped coil (think autotransformer) exceeded the 7000 volts
the teflon was supposed to withstand... Well, we dissected the
parts... The metal is salvageable and I have more teflon.. I will
double the thickness for the next test... As we were turning out the
lights and leaving I looked back at the Henry... I could swear the
plate meter winked at me...

denny / k8do