Building A RF Dummy Load

If your doing any home brewing gear for ham radio its a great idea to have a dummy load. This will to your radio be the perfect antenna...it will never radiate but your radio sees a perfect 50 Ohm impedance.

Now for a bit of math...you need enough resistors to give you more power handeling and your radio needs to see 50Ohm. If you run resistors in parallel your total impedance will be:
Dummy load impedance: Ohm rating of 1 resistor / # of resistors
Total watt capacity: watt rating of 1 resistor X # of resistors

IE: placing 20 1Kohm 3w resistors in parallel will give you 50 Ohm and a total capacity of 60 watts

There are many types of resistors out there...be sure to stay away from wire wound types and ideally if you can get them a carbon film type will work best, although many types will be ok.

The following pictures show my build process of soldering in parallel, and assembly. The abs tube was finalized by placing mineral oil inside for heat disapation and glued and sealed up.

Works like a charm!!