I am currently in the process of building a dummy load capable of 500 watts. With the amp project capable of potentially a couple hundred watts, being able to dissipate a lot of power for extended periods of time is kind of needed. Yeah i want to run full key down for like an hour into a dummy load to really stress test the whole amp design.

The dummy load will use 25 100 watt 50ohm resistors in a 5 in series 5 in parallel configuration, mounted on a huge heat sink with fans. Hopefully this will dissipate the amount of heat that will be generated. Anyway, this got me thinking about the dummy load that i built many years ago using 20 5w ebay resistors in parallel and how well it actually performed. Back then i did not have the test gear to actually characterise it. But i have had a VNA for a while now, well, not really a VNA more a glorified S11 meter that measures via vectors. 🙂

So i plugged it in and gave it a look and well, to my surprise it was not all that bad. 1.05 to 1 from 1Mhz to 60Mhz, which is the limit of measurement for my VNA. I am only interested in HF so more than good enough for the kinds of builds I make. I think it would be usable into the 2m band, but from there on parasitic’s would really take over and make it more or less unusable.

After doing this measurement, i kind of decided to order and better VNA and be able to do 2 port measurements and have extended frequency range. I have some other things i want to build like rf taps etc that would really benefit from having a full characterisation done. Oh and filters.