Topbanders,
It was good to work VK3AJJ and VK3QI with my 150 watts this morning. Last
night was very noisy again, and I could barely hear Jeff, K1ZM, thru the
59+20 db static crashes. I wonder if he's worked all continents yet?
Thanks to the many of you who responded concerning a replacement for my
variable cap. Two good suggestions were to measure the capactance (I can do
that with my BK cap meter) and then substitute a high voltage fixed
capacitor. The other suggestion was to use a vacuum variable (those things
are expensive!).
Thanks especially to John, K9UWA, who answered my post elsewhere a month ago
asking how to resubscribe to the 160M reflector. I had been off for about 8
months. John has been mentoring my 160M shunt fed tower experiments. In the
past few days, Earl, K6SE has also been helping me with same. Thanks. To
those of you with metal towers of almost any kind or height, try shunt
feeding them. It's a lot easier than I had thought. I wish I had tried a
couple of years ago with my 40' Rohn tower with a KT-34XA and 6M beam on it.
It might have worked better than the Hytower and low FW loop I used that
winter to work 70 countries.
Anyway, yesterday I added 18' of wire to my shunt fed inverted L. I now have
a little over 60' of wire coming down at a 45 degree angle from the top of
the 90' of tower. That brought thr resonance down into the band, around
1885 KHz. Several checks on SSB last night showed my shunt fed vertical to be
about an S unit stronger than the Hytower or FW loop in most directions.
Today, I added 8 more radials for a total now of 20, all .25 to .4
wavelengths long. Will be adding radials and experimenting with a
capacitive top hat in the coming weeks
I'll be on again tonight and tomorrow morning.
Doug W0AH Colorado
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