While the 80 meter loop wouldn’t tune up on 160 meters, it was doing a great job as a receiving antenna on the band. (More to follow on the loop antenna’s performance in later posts.) All this did though was to make me want to put up an 160 meter antenna that much more. I did have a half-sloper for 160 meters sitting in the shack, something I’d been eyeing for a while, wondering if it would be worth putting up. At least it would be enough of an antenna to scratch that itch! Read more…
Last week, I replaced the HGSW beam with a full wavelength 80 meter Skywave Loop Antenna. The antenna is about 285 feet long and is suspended between four trees at about 80 feet high, roughly shaped as a trapezoid (two parallel sides). It is fed with about 100 feet of 450 ohm ladder line into a 4:1 balun, followed by about 20 ft of coax into the radio.
Reason for change:
While the HGSW beam performed well on 80 meters, it was only marginal on 40 m and not dramatically better than a dipole on the higher bands. Lately though, it has become almost impossible to tune it on 40 meters. Read more…
TA-33jr installed on Chimney Mount
Well, “a” TA-33 is up, not the same one.
The upper bands have been heating up all summer and I was getting the urge to do something to improve on my antennas. While the HGSW antenna does a fair job all around, I wanted something better. Read more…
Here’s one for the books. Today, I hooked up my new toy, a Rigblaster Advantage, and spent a fair amount of time testing. With a local friend listening on HF, I tested it out as a voice keyer on all the bands before this weekend’s CQ WPX contest. I wanted to make sure everything was working fine, and that there were no distorted signals on any bands. For the most part, everything was fine, but there was a surprise in store. Local talk radio station WPTF was in the background on my signal! Read more…
Do you have an MFJ-434 attached to your Yaesu FT-1000MP, but your microphone doesn’t work well or the radio starts retuning downward when you engage the EDSP? Then it’s time to check those 434 jumper settings!
For years, I’ve had an MFJ-434 voice keyer that I wanted to use with my Yaesu FT-1000MP during contests. Sometimes, it would work fine. Other times, the combination of the radio and the keyer would do strange things. Often, I would just disconnect the keyer and set it aside – I wasn’t in the mood to troubleshoot during a contest. Afterwards, once I recovered, I wasn’t really in the mood to troubleshoot the problem. I spent a lot of time searching the internet for a solution, but never found anything that worked. In fact, I didn’t find much on the topic at all. Anyways, with Field Day approaching, combined with the relay problem that I had (see http://w4ft.com/2010/06/yaesu-ft-1000mp-transmit-relay-replacement/ ) I decided to spend some time really digging into this one. The good news: I found a solution – the correct jumper settings for the MFJ-434 to work with the FT-1000MP! Read more…
Failed RL6016 transmit relay - the black component at the top edge.
What do you do when your Yaesu FT-1000MP, your main base HF rig, that’s been a trusted partner for over a decade, just doesn’t want to transmit? As if antenna problems weren’t enough, now I have to perform surgery on my old friend. Fortunately, this is a story with a happy ending.
For a while now, I’ve been experiencing some difficulty tuning my Yaesu FT-1000MP. I’ve been trying to figure out how to resolve this problem, but was still able to operate reasonably well, so I carried on. Anyways, on certain band segments, the internal tuner would hunt around for a long time but wouldn’t be able to tune the antenna for the frequency. Sometimes, tuning up or down the band, letting the tuner lock in and then coming back would work, but it was annoying. Recently, that changed completely. The radio would no longer tune at all. Instead, it would just show an infinite SWR and the protection circuit would cut output power to milliwatts, as designed. This is what happened when the radio was tuned to the antenna resonant frequencies, so it isn’t a mismatch issue. (Yes, I know that most internal tuners only function if the SWR is 3:1 or less.) Read more…
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