70cm 250W Amplifier from secondhand DVB-T PA Part Two

With the amplifier built the next item on the list was finding a power supply for it.   Originally I was going to use two HP DPS-600PB server supplies in series which would have given around 28V at 55A.

While building the amplifier I had an email from a fellow amateur Steve G4MJW asking what LPF I was using and we have been helping one another out with ideas since.

One of Steve suggestions was to use an old Ericsson 27.2V 55A PSU from a RBS 2216 900MHz GSM station which are / were available on eBay for £28 plus postage.    The nice thing with the Ericsson PSU over the HP server modules was the fact everything was in one unit.  

I couldn't find much information on these PSU however I did find a German website detailing a tear down of the RSB2216 unit including the PSU with a rather handy note that you would adjust one of the trimpots, the one on its own furthest from the three that are in line,  to increase the output voltage to 28.2V from the standard 27.2V.

One thing Steve noticed before me as he ran his for longer than a few minutes was the temperature of the case which was hot to the touch to the point the unit turned itself off.  

I ran mine for and hour and half an in that time the temperature got up to a rather barmy 39 degrees C, so some cooling was in order.  

My original thought was to use some small 30mm fans attached to the rear plate of the unit but in the end I went with two 28V 80mm fans purchased from eBay.  

The fans worked great and in fact I think a single fan would suffice and to be honest two or three 30mm fans on the back would also probably be enough.

With the fans installed the unit now runs cold so a success all in all.

The next thing to do was find a way of connecting equipment to the unit and again Steve came to the rescue when he pointed out he'd bought some banana jack sockets from eBay that by chance happened to have a thread big enough to self tap in the original DC power socket.

All in all modifying the PSU and getting it and running took an afternoon of drilling and filing to fit the fans and 10 minutes to wire it all up.

I have to thank Steve greatly for coming up with this PSU it saved me an awful lot of mucking around and gave a nicer / safer unit than the HP server supplies.

The finished PSU