So i out one of these fets onto by board to test out. All the CBers tell me is the bomb diggety and makes more POWA than the IRF510. Well other than lifting a pad when i pulled it off the board, I did not find the device to be all that stimulating. I found it to be rather pedantic with a very narrow window of opportunity, with it being either off, on or in full oscillation. With its default being oscillation.
Ok, so it made nice power, I was getting 25 watts out of it, and those watts were nice and clean and linear. But for the life of me, it was persnickety. I had to turn off the gate bias, if it had much more than about 1/2 a volt it would oscillate, if the drive at the input to all those stages varied either side of 200mv by as little as 50mv it would either turn off, or it would oscillate. But while happy, it was very happy, but that window was so narrow that it would be impossible to use in a project.
Now i am aware that it is quite possible that it was just my board layout or design that was the cause of the oscillation, failure is always an option and what manifested with one device might not show with another that is more forgiving. Not something I can easily test for. But I do have a push pull board I can build up and drop a couple of fets into and see what they do. But that might have to wait for another day.
Oh I have respun this board into a CW transmitter and have sent off to china to have them made. That will give me something to play with while I think about the HT project and how I am going to proceed with it. I am having trouble with the receiver and then I need to start thinking about better integration between the boards and how I want to deal with tx/tx switching. I am thinking of turning off the whole PA board when in RX, which would require some redesign. But more to come on that when I work out how I am going to do it.
