I was quite ill in 2017 so no ham radio for that year, then 2018 and
2019 was all fly fishing for brookies and salmon, so no ham radio those
years either. The fly fishing season is in full swing between early May
to September, so no summer DXing! The hamshack out behind my house has
been dormant and unused for over three years. The mice moved in and all
the bands are compromised. I did a bunch of work and have the ten meter
stuff fixed. I started out fixing up the six meter stuff next. I had to
do some work on my diesel generator too, and it is working well now. I
had a cooling problem, but got that all fixed and all is well after
three years of sitting idle. I rigged up a small solar panel and charge
controller to keep the generator battery in good condition. That worked
very well. I checked the VSWR of my four six meter yagis, and they all
looked reasonable, but I had a huge loss in my switchig system. I
suspected that the 6 position coax relay was NG, and had lots of loss on
receive.
I started the sprint at 7 PM and was immediately aware that my hearing
was definitely impaired. Stations in Connecticut that are normally
loud, were quite weak. It was very obvious. K1TEO was 4 or 5 s-units.
Jeff is normally S-9. Same for good buddy Ron, WZ1V. They were both
rather weak here. I figure that six meters was down about 10 dB or more
on receive. I had huge problems copying most callers as they were
barely audible and in the noise. In the Sprint, I did work one or two
stations in FN20 in NY or NJ, but the usual result for me is many
contacts in grids down into Maryland and the Washington DC area, and out
to Buffalo and Toronto to the west. I heard none of that, so I was sure
that my hearing was compromised. The good news was that there was a bit
of sporadic E to the SW and west. I ended up working 108 QSOs in 45
grids. Not bad for being deaf! Sporadic E signals tend to be louder!
Most of the evening was spent on SSB. I tried some CW but had no luck
there, so went back to SSB. It was fun to snag some rovers out in the
Chicago area. AC0RA/R, K0PG/R, K0JK/R, K9ILP/R, and K9PW/R all went in
the log here. It was really great to hear Pete, K9PW. He operated from
here many times in the September contests. I finally went up to the FT-8
frequency after about 0215 UT. I hooked up a laptop, and tried making
some contacts. That was a chore as the laptop was an old XP machine
maybe 15 years old or more. The time was not set, as the BIOS battery
had long since died. At least my home made internet link was working. I
run a 5 GHz link from my house to the hill shack. I manually adjusted
the time to get the computer to decode. That was tedious. I made a few
contacts, and then made the mistake of trying to switch between antennas
when the transmitter was automatically transmitting. That was a big NO
NO. You cannot switch coaxial relays under full power. (1200 watts on
FT8) I wiped out the six position coaxial relay. Instantly, I had
infinite VSWR and when I quit the xmission, I had no receive at all in
any position. It was a really bad mistake as 6 position fast switching
coax relays are as rare as hens teeth. I was dead in the water.
The next day, I removed the coax switching matrix from the shack wall,
and have it on the bench for testing. Only the six position relay is
hosed. I am re building it and hope to get something back together
soon. In the meantime, I plugged in a power divider to the two top
yagis. I immediately saw that the background noise came way up. It went
from S4 to S8! This is all power line noise from Eversource in New
Hampshire. So it looks like there was a problem in the relays and not
in the antennas. The power line noise is a huge project. Getting the
utility to fix their poles is a constant process and consumes huge
amounts of time on my part. It is very frustrating. In the past I had to
get the FCC to threaten them two different times. My file folder on that
is about 4 inches thick! I would rather go fishing.
I am really happy with my results. Having a 10 dB pad on receive was a
good handicap. If I ever get the switching stuff fixed, I should be back
in business.
73
Dave K1WHS
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