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Bird 43 Wattmeter

Lscott

By Lscott

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I picked up the very clean looking Bird 43 wattmeter at the Hamvention in Ohio, 5/2023, with a leather case for about $200. 

Shopping elsewhere in the flea market area I also got a “N” type connector, looked basically new for $30, to swap out the SO-239 one on the side.

These wattmeters are well accepted as a reliable instrument for measuring RF power. It’s not uncommon to see radio service manuals refer to it when setting up, or checking, the power calibration on a radio.  
 
I also picked up a couple of 5 watt elements covering 100-250 MHz and the 400-1000 MHz range for testing used HT’s I buy. Would get some higher power ones in the future to test a few 50 watt mobile radios and some high power VHF and UHF amplifiers I own.

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Misc. Radio Gear

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WRXN668

Were the plug-in elements included in the $200 purchase or did you have to spend extra, and if extra, what are they going for these days?

I also have a Bird 43, mine came with N-type connectors and a single plug-in element, a 400-1000MHz 250W unit.  A bit too strong for GMRS on an HT but I'm also licensed for amateur.

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Lscott
3 hours ago, WRXN668 said:

Were the plug-in elements included in the $200 purchase or did you have to spend extra, and if extra, what are they going for these days?

I also have a Bird 43, mine came with N-type connectors and a single plug-in element, a 400-1000MHz 250W unit.  A bit too strong for GMRS on an HT but I'm also licensed for amateur.

It cost me another $50 extra per element. The prices are all over the place for them depending on power and frequency range. Looking on eBay they’re going for as little as $30 to $100 to $200 used. I’ll just have keep looking at the swaps and see what shows up for a good price.

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WRXN668
2 hours ago, Lscott said:

It cost me another $50 extra per element. The prices are all over the place for them depending on power and frequency range. Looking on eBay they’re going for as little as $30 to $100 to $200 used. I’ll just have keep looking at the swaps and see what shows up for a good price.

That's in line with what I was seeing as well.

Ultimately I would like to find a 10C, an 10D, a 100C, and a 100D.  I mostly expect to be working with 2m and 70cm for ham and the similar GMRS and MURS bands, I'm OK with only using part of the range of the meter so long as the equipment I'm testing will usually use half of the range.

Your meter itself is in a lot better shape than mine.  Mine was in a testing and production-shipping lab for what originally was a paging company, before they got into selling paging systems and then later selling unified messaging conversion systems for other carriers.  I have a transmitter that I'm pretty sure was used to send out pages to beepers, crystalled for 462.900MHz.  I expect it was pretty high wattage and that the 250W-scale 400-1000MHz unit I have was properly sized for the application.

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