brainwagon

Okay, I knew that my radio was acting deaf, and I thought I’d know what was wrong. I use a low doublet antenna made from speaker wire, and it has been outside, weathering the elements for quite some time. Sure enough, when I went outside, I saw that one of the connections feeding my balun looked a bit iffy. I stripped it back a bit, rehooked it up, and figured that was it. But when I went back inside, no dice.

I then whipped out my trusty MFJ antenna analyzer. A quick probe from the inside connection indicated nothing dramatically wrong, by itself the SWR on 30m would be something like 2.5, well within what my tuner should pull. Then, I realized I hadn’t checked the piece of coax that I used to bridge the gap to my transceiver. Bingo! SWR over 8 across the entire frequency band. Not good! But easy to replace. I had a shorter length, and with a little rearrangement, I was back on the air.

And, in a previous day where I had only 15 spots of three stations all day, I had lots of reports this time. Here are my overnight WSPR spots.

Or, presented graphically:

Glad to see that debugged. I think over the next week I’m going to restart my aborted attempt to work all states via the JT-65 mode, at last count I had 42 states. I also think that antenna upgrades are in order: my doublet is simply too low and ridiculous to continue. I also want to do a receive only antenna, and get a dedicated QRSS grabber back online pretty soon. Stay tuned, and hope to work some of you on the air.