I went to Orlando Hamcation today to see my Flex Radio buds, especially hoping to get a preview of the new Power Genius XL amp. It was there, connected to a 6700 in all of its glory heating up a huge bird dummy load. The price will be essentially $7K. It is a fully functional, full 1500W QSK SO2R powerhouse.
The amp has 2 1.5 KW LDMOS power transistors and is easily capable of 1500W 100% duty cycle operation in ICAS service. What that means is you can run the amp at full output. If any parameter faults (like temp) the amp will shut itself down until the parameters come back in line. So you can use the amp to run a RTTY contest and as long as you come up for air once in a while no problemo. The amp has an excellent cooling system which is very quiet and advances its aggression as the transistors require. The fan advances in a relatively linear step-wise fashion, in other words it isn't quiet and full blast but gently advances and recedes as junction temp dictates. I made a quick cell video at the bottom to demonstrate. The amp has a very cool feature (pun intended) in that it automatically adjusts its class according to mode, so CW is running in class C and SSB is class AB. I totally love this idea.
This is a shot of the 6700 and the amp. Note width and length the amp and the radio are virtually identical but the amp is about twice as tall as the radio
Here is a shot of the three brainiacs involved and friends of mine. L to R Steve Hicks N5AC VP of engineering at Flex, Renko Boca 4O3A Power Genius designer and proprietor of 4O3A.com, and Gerald Youngblood K5SDR who cooked up the Flex SDR revolution. I started with Flex in the early 3 board stack days and never looked back. As the Grateful Dead say what a long strange trip its been. The amp is fully integrated with the Flex line of radios using Ethernet server client connectivity, but also provides access for other brands of radio transceivers allowing for automatic functionality.
The Power Genius brings full SO2R functionality to a single amp, and with a 6700 only 2 components namely the 6700 and the Genius, a computer and contest software like N1MM+ or WriteLog and incidentals like a Mic, paddle or digi software and maybe a Flex Control you are SO2R on the air
Here are the guys and the equipment mugging for my blog shots
The amp is self contained with a big honkin server power supply yet weighs in at only 33lbs. The power supply has a wide ranging input voltage capability so this might be an ideal amp to lug on down to the Islands for things like CQWW or various DXpeditions. More can be learned at the Flex site The QSK is butter smooth. Color me impressed. Impressed enough to become $7K poorer.
Notice how the green light turns red when transmiting. It turns purple when doing an update like the 6700. It is now FCC type accepted
73 W9OY
