Hi.

Earlier in the week, I bought a Mirage B5018G amplifier, and today I 
decided to hook it up.  I had gotten someone to eyeball the connectors, and 
I put braille labels on the connectors to keep them straight once my friend 
described the back panel layout.

Tonight, I decided to hook it up, and after putting wire ends on the power 
leads to facilitate connecting it to a power supply, I noticed that I 
didn't have the loads balanced very well between the two power 
supplies.  So I started shuffling radios around until I had a better 
distribution of current loads on the two power supplies in my 
station.  Unfortunately I hit a snag when I started reconnecting radios 
after swapping them around on the two supplies--nothing on the Astron RS35M 
seemed to be working.  I was getting pretty frantic as the inoperative 
radios included my Kenwood TW4000A, my Kenwood TS790A, my Kenwood TM3530, 
my Ten Tec Argonaut 509 and a couple of DSP filters.  After disconnecting 
things, I discovered that the TW4000A was working when it was the only 
thing on the power supply.  The supply stayed up as I started connecting 
various things until I got to the TM3530 whereupon the power supply 
immediately shut down again.

I keep my polarities straight by putting either a piece of electrical tape 
or cable ties on the negative lead, but I smelled a rat with the '3530 
because I had purchased it used from another blind ham.  So I disconnected 
it and ran next door to the neighbor's house to find out what color the 
wire with the piece of tape on it was.  Sure enough, it was 
red.  Fortunately, I didn't smell any smoke, and I was hoping that the 
reason the supply shut down was because there was a diode connected acros 
the power leads to short them when reverse polarity was applied.  Two 
thought were running through my mind--what a pain in the rear it was going 
to be if I had lost the power supply,and how much fun I would have trying 
to find another 220 MHz radio at this stage of the game.

I changed the tape on the TM3530 cord to be consistent with the remainder 
of the wiring in my station, and figured that I had little to lose by 
trying to hook it up again.  Fortunately when I reversed the leads 
everything was working again.  I can't figure out why I didn't blow the 
fuses in the TM3530 though.  I was surprised that the over current 
circuitry in the Astron worked like it was supposed to, because I have 
destroyed a couple of older Astron supplies by accidentally shorting them.

By the way, has anyone found a color probe that is sensitive enough to pick 
up the color of the insulation on a piece of wire?  That would have saved 
me a lot of grief today.

73, de Lou K2LKK



Louis Kim Kline
A.R.S. K2LKK
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