The short answer is, for ham radio use or any other use, buy the best power supply that does what you need and is within your budget. An additional thought is to carefully consider the positive AND negative sides of each feature of the power supply. Also, use GENUINE end-user reviews to help guide you. Details follow.
Determine Requirements – This is the most critical step. There may be many requirements. In my recent experience I needed to buy a replacement power supply for a ham radio base station. The Kenwood power supply that my wife had been given was 30 years old and worked quite well for a couple of years after we put it into use. The power supply was a workhorse that we took for granted. We turned it on and it worked as required. It supplied power to a Yaesu FT-857D radio that was used for multiple purposes. Most importantly the equipment was used for quite a few SkyWarn severe weather spotter ham radio nets. Fortunately, the power supply did not fail during a critical task. Rather, it failed during a weekly 6 meter rag chew net. It failed just before a 3 day weekend which was nice because I was able to travel to Milwaukee Wisconsin to Amateur Equipment Supply (AES Milwaukee) to buy a replacement supply.
Your requirement may be specific to general. My requirements started with the specific. I needed to supply the radio with at least 22 amps continuous for full transmit power at 100 watts. The power supply needed to be able to convert AC power from a standard wall plug with a 20 amp circuit breaker into 13.8 volts DC. And the power supply needed to operate in full use for long periods of time. Cooling of the power supply would be an issue.
Determine Budget – Be realistic. You may have a $25 budget but if that will only buy you a power supply that will quickly burn out it may not be worth spending the money on the equipment. I like to review options, get a high and low price and then shop features and quality and try to find the sweet spot of quality, features and price. Since this power supply was to be used for emergency communications on a routine basis I put the emphasis on quality. Budget was also a concern.
I reviewed the offerings at Amateur Equipment Supply (AES Milwaukee) and quickly located a feature rich, low priced offering that seemed like quite a nice deal. But Milwaukee was a good hour’s drive away. A bit more research was needed.
If you haven’t use http://www.eham.net/reviews/ to research ham radio equipment, I strongly suggest you use it. With a grain of salt. Realize that people that write the reviews may not be the unbiased ham radio operators that you think they are. Some may be the best friends of the equipment manufacturers. Others may write for the direct competition of the equipment manufacturers. In general, if you read a good number of reviews of several products you can get a pretty good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the products you are interested in. I did this for a particular MFJ power supply. My glee was dashed when I read that that cooling fan was about as loud as a 747 on take-off. I exaggerate of course, but you get the point. A quick review lead me to the power supply that I did eventually purchase.
I ended up with an Astron 35M. The 35 means that it will do as much as 35 amps on an intermittent basis and will do 25 amps continuously. 25 is a good number for my use. I need 22 for the radio. That leaves 3 for a bit of cusion and / or ability to have another low amperage device – say my APRS tracker – connected to it as well. My “nice to haves” are the two power meters – one for voltage and one for amps being used – that the unit has. Additional options I considered as less important were adjustment controls for voltage and additional terminals and a cigarette lighter socket. I did not get those. Some hams feel that the more things you have to go wrong on equipment, the more that will.
If I had a larger budget I likely would have bought a still larger amp – just for the future uses I am not aware of right now. At the same time, when I talked to a person at AES Milwaukee that did not sell me the unit, he said he had one for decades and it is a good reliable workhorse. THAT is what I wanted. Also very simple to operate. One switch – it’s either on at the correct voltage or it’s off.
If my prior ham radio power supply had not kicked the bucket like it did I would have had time to do more shopping on the internet. THAT probably is THE way to buy a power supply. I chose not to wait for the delivery time, etc.. I wanted mine in-service for the long weekend. For my purposes, I am quite happy with the ham radio power supply that I purchased after a good amount of use. I hope that you will be happy with all of your purchases as well.
My new power supply does not require a cooling fan and emits no noticeable ham radio frequency interference!
Stay Radio Active!
Jon Kreski – AB9NN – Appleton, Wisconsin / Green Bay, Wisconsin area
http://www.HamRadioResources.com
P.S. Please visit my website daily for solar weather and propagation forecasts as well as Twitter updates and fresh blog post notifications!
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