I was feeling kind of “on a roll” this morning, after two successful activations. When I set out today, I had a couple of options; do some POTA, or run errands.
Even as I left home I was not certain which way to go, but I brought the radio bag just in case. It was late enough that the long drive to Mecan River SFA didn’t seem feasible, so I headed west toward the errands, or Wildcat Mountain (still not sure).
As I came up to Wildcat, I decided to stop there and give POTA a try. There was nothing on the shopping list that was all that urgent, after all … . The park was just as empty as it was on Sunday, so I took the same space that I used for WFD and set up there. It was fractionally warmer (?) today, but much windier.
Set up the antenna, turned on the radio … there was a DX station, faintly calling CQ; I tuned onward and found another faint DX; a couple of kilowatt ragchews and a net starting up …
I looked at the POTA spots page and tried a few of the frequencies: quite a few activations, but nothing heard.
Antenna issues?
Here’s where it gets interesting: I thought I would run an SWR scan, just for curiousity. Around 2.5:1 across the band!
I fooled around with the whip a bit; lowering the pole, then extending or collapsing the whip a bit and trying another scan.
Eh, really I could have just used the auto-tuner and operated, but the unimpressive band conditions were already sapping my motivation and this took me all the way to “let’s just fold it up and go home”.
As I was taking the antenna down I noticed (again) the water (now ice) that had penetrated every tubular bit of my setup sometime last year, during an activation that ended in light rain conditions. Still there, never dried out. It was causing a bit of resistance when extending and retracting the sections, both pole and whip.
All signs seem to be pointing to one conclusion: bring all that antenna stuff indoors, dry it out, and map out a course of action to find the reason for the high SWR.
Groundhog Day update, about 1 week later:
Well, it’s official; Punsutawney Phil and Staten Island Chuck agree, we’re looking at six more weeks of winter. Oh. Gosh. What a shock!
Today I pulled out all of the extensible bits of my Buddipole vertical antenna and laid them out on the floor for a few hours to (hopefully) get dry internally. I also took everything apart; the Versa-Tee, the coax-and-balun assembly, and the alleged “counterpoise” that I’ve been using for a few years.
First thing to diagnose will be simply checking the coaxial cable with an ohmmeter for continuity. I’m not sure how to go about checking / inspecting the balun, it’s sealed inside hot-melt-glue lined heatshrink tubing.
Lots of things to inspect and test! So many possible points of failure or instability! I plan to replace the counterpoise with a single length of wire that can be accurately measured.
Time to get this post published; it’s already been a week!
Thank you for visiting driftlessqrp, watch for another post really soon!