It’s the middle of summer already! At least in my mind it is the middle of summer. I know, the first day of summer was just a few days ago; but, I am a product of the 50’s and 60’s and summer started right after school ended as far as we were concerned. And in those days school ended a day or two before or after Memorial Day as the Taft High School band always played for the Fleet of Flowers and we had to wear those wool uniforms and get them turned into Mr. Kelmer even though school was out.
But alas and alack, Chuck, this is a blog for the Amateur Radio Club so get with it! The last month has not treated me to a lot of time to play with my radios. I have had a few highlights like learning to use the new magnetic loop antenna I acquired. It helped me with a problem I didn’t know I had. I was on my deck using the magnetic loop with two different transceivers, an Icom IC-706mkIIg and a software defined Resent RS-918.
It was a Sunday afternoon and I was tuned to a 40 meter net The Western Social Net which operates on Sundays from 1:00 to 4:00 on 7.230Mhz. The receptions was good and I was copying stations from British Columbia to Reno and Southern California. I tried a number of times to log onto the Net to no avail. What did I expect, I was only putting out 10 to 20 watts PEP on SSB.
After an hour with no success, I went down to my ham shack and tuned up my Icom IC-746 Pro putting out 100 watts or if I kicked on the amplifier I would generate 500 watts. I could barely hear the stations that had been 59 on the magnetic loop! This did not bode well! My finely tuned Ham Diagnostic Sense (somewhat akin to the cartoon character’s Spidey Sense) told me, “There is a problem with your station!”
My diagnostic mind shifted into high gear! Two weeks before, my son had been weed eating and suddenly my signal strength dropped to zero. Was it interference from the noisy weed eater’s engine? No, it was the weed eater cutting my coax thus in technical jargon preventing the signals captured by my antenna and traveling down the coax to my transceiver to get to my transceiver. My acutely technical mind immediately came up with a solution; “you must replace the coax, Chuck!”
That may seem like an easy fix but you must realize some important factors. First of all I’m 78 y.o. And crawling under the house (which used to be a simple chore) now is neither simple nor safe. I had to ask myself do you really want the embarrassment of the Fire Department extracting you from that crawl space?? Secondly will the current body type even fit through the crawl hole used by the earlier version did string the coax?
The answer to both questions would be, probably not! But I have multiple runs of coax as at one time I had multiple antennas. “Substitute W7CRG … substitute!” So I picked the LMR 400 cable which had run out to a vertical antenna. It was the newest and would conduct a signal the best. The connection had been on the ground but I carefully “waterproofed” the coax connector with antenna tape.
To get to the point, the expensive tape job didn’t work. Water had seeped up the dielectric and caused all sorts of bad things from corroding the shielding to creating a resistance between the shielding and the center conductor. I substituted another coax and wow! I had signals getting to my radio!
Putting up antennas and stringing coax is not an easy task. Therefore, when we get it done we tend to leave it alone and “not fix what ain’t broken” …. until it is broken.
Lesson to be learned, no matter how much precaution we take … things break and deteriorate. If things change at your station, there is usually a reason and it is better to fix it as soon as you can.
So, get on the air! If you need help or advise, ask for it! Enjoy your summer and tr y to include Ham Radio! July 1st starts the 13 Original Colonies special event. Check the web page for info!
Happy 4th of July! 73 Chuck Gerttula W7CRG
