Dawn
Member
I picked up one of these meters from a Veteran's thrift shop for 35 bucks. Pretty beat up on the outside and lots of UV browning to the plastic buttons, but the sliding panel must have been used as the plastic is good and the scale unfaded. Like anything Sencore, the switches really needed some heavy duty cleaning before anything worked and was reliable. Completely disassembled and scrubbed, it doesn't look too bad. Inside was clean and in pretty nice condition.
Surprisingly, it tracked a Bird termaline pretty accurately just as is in average mode. I wound up doing the cal on it anyways after I bought a manual copy. This is one really nice meter and pretty gutsy inside for a wattmeter with a rather elaborate meter amp and peak detecting circuit, not the typical pair of time constant caps in peak mode. I can see why they fetch such high prices on E-bay in good condition and probably went for some big bucks new. The remote directional coupler makes this a joy to have on the bench rather then having to run cables to the meter. It even has a built in dummy load if you want to use it as a terminating watt meter. They apparently sold an extention cord for the coupler to work on vehicles. Nice touch if you had to work alone tuning an antenna.
I've never been much of a fan of anything Sencore made, but I'd certainly give this one a thumbs up. It's limited to only 20 watts, but that can easily be overcome with a power attenuator or modificaton for a 200W scale. These will suck two 9V batteries dry in no time, but you can use a wall wart with it for bench or station use. If you come by one of these, by all means buy it, but get a hypodermic needle and small bottle of Deoxit. You're going to need it.
Surprisingly, it tracked a Bird termaline pretty accurately just as is in average mode. I wound up doing the cal on it anyways after I bought a manual copy. This is one really nice meter and pretty gutsy inside for a wattmeter with a rather elaborate meter amp and peak detecting circuit, not the typical pair of time constant caps in peak mode. I can see why they fetch such high prices on E-bay in good condition and probably went for some big bucks new. The remote directional coupler makes this a joy to have on the bench rather then having to run cables to the meter. It even has a built in dummy load if you want to use it as a terminating watt meter. They apparently sold an extention cord for the coupler to work on vehicles. Nice touch if you had to work alone tuning an antenna.
I've never been much of a fan of anything Sencore made, but I'd certainly give this one a thumbs up. It's limited to only 20 watts, but that can easily be overcome with a power attenuator or modificaton for a 200W scale. These will suck two 9V batteries dry in no time, but you can use a wall wart with it for bench or station use. If you come by one of these, by all means buy it, but get a hypodermic needle and small bottle of Deoxit. You're going to need it.
