Linears: Tell me what I need to know before I buy

Well I researched everything before I put in mine and never used it till I knew everything was 100 percent and to my liking....

 

Since you only have a AM radio, you don't need an amp with SSB biasing.

Brands...I recommend Texas Star. They aren't big on power, but what they ARE big on (for an amp anyways) is cleanliness. In your case, a Texas Star DX350V would work. You can use the variable knob on the front to drop the incoming carrier so that you don't have to open your Cobra and find the carrier adjustment.

Beware....Any amp with Toshiba pills in it will cost you because they don't make them anymore. But they're supposedly better than the new DEI pills and better than MOSFETs so I read.

Another option if you can find one is the old Boomer 400's aka Palomar 400. They had four SD-1446's inside in a row and the amp is good for 300 watts. The nice thing is on these amps you can run a 4 watt carrier/16 watt swing into them and they will work fine. I had one of these once on a stock Uniden PC68LTW and a Wilson 1000 and could talk 15-20 miles reliably and that was around hilly terrain.

No need for a comp box like an X force or Davemade. They're class C and not clean. Clean is mean. Not heard like a turd. Remember that.

Clean is mean.
Not heard like a turd.

 

I'm not quite sure where you got your information from. the Henry ss750 uses Toshiba 2Sc2879 transistors.
my Texas Star DX 1000 used Toshiba SD1446 transistors. my Texas Star DX1600v used Toshiba 2SC2879 transistors. to the best of my knowledge all of them are class a/b biased

 

I agree about Class C being dirty 99% of the time. Here is a prime example of the 1% of the time it can be super clean.
I don't know anyone else capable of doing this.

 

Who

Whoa....Care if I ask what exactly happened that caused this truck to burn down?

 

Here's another example of Class C working perfectly but only if it is assembled in the customer's vehicle with the same cable used on the bench.

 

somewhere in this forum is a thread about David bupp and amplifier and Dave explains what he does.
in that explanation is the answer to your question after you watch the video about does coax length matter.
dad doesn't have a power supply on his bench large enough to power the amplifier so he has to leave it in the customer's vehicle and run a couple hundred foot cables out his window to connect the amplifier to his Bench.
and even if it looks good on his bench when it gets installed in the customer's vehicle it is using a different cable and everything changes when once it goes in the customer's vehicle as this video shows. Dave doesn't have a clue about how Class C amplifier work.

 

I assume the customers amplifier went into Self-Oscillation.
the customer failed to recognize the problem and failed to disconnect the power cables in time before It caught fire.

 

I kind of thought this was a little bit funnier