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Old 14th Oct 2018, 4:28 pm   #3
Radio Wrangler
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Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Fife, Scotland, UK.
Posts: 22,800
Default Re: MuTek Pre-amps for the FT290R

The Japanese manufacturers latched onto sensitivity as their main marketing figure and competed against each other with it. Most of their radios were not short on sensitivity. Rather the reverse. In trying to get lots of sensitivity, their designers took their eye off the ball in terms of overload and non-linearity.

What Chris did with his MuTek front ends was to fix the overload issues so that radios were still useful when there was a pager transmitter banging away several megahertz away or another amateur at the other end of the village.

Don't fit one expecting any sort of revelation in increased sensitivity. Look for one if you're suffering blocking.

Chris Bartram is a very skilled RF designer with a good sense of compromise for all the interacting factors and produced a nicely balanced design... he still does. There are new things from him keep appearing in the microwave groups, and he has been known to play the fiddle at the dinners after meetings of the microwave roundtable. He's still very much on the go, but closed down Mutek and moved into consultancy many years ago.

David
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