Well, as I’m pretty much out of radio activity due to cold weather (no more balcony fishing pole) and the magloop build fail, it’s time to catch up on some backlogged projects. One year after getting my ticket, it’s time to build a dummy load !
Now, there are many ways to do this and I wanted the most elegant one (no packs of 1/2W resistors for me). For a dummy load, you basically need a pure 50Ω resistor with good thermals (needed to dissipate the power generated and transformed into heat) and no reactance. So, off to Aliexpress again and got these resistors which claim to do 250W.
Add a PL-259 connector, some 1 mm enameled wire because it was lying around, an old PC PSU heatsink and some 3D printing – voila !
Measures 50.02Ω and stood up just fine in the dummy load testing that I performed – future post coming up.