From:
Fred Hopengarten, K1VR
Six Willarch Road * Lincoln, MA 01773-5105 * 617/259-0088
e-mail: k1vr@juno.com
Big antennas, high in the sky, are better than small ones, low.
On Fri, 11 Oct 1996 10:18:54 -0700 rattmann@cts.com (rattmann) writes:
>Interesting things happen to connectors with aging. Last year I had a
>piece
>of RG-213 look "open" and it was driving me crazy finding the problem.
> I
>had a cable splice in a termination box, joining a cable-end male-N to
>a
>cable-end female-N. There was no strain on this splice. It turned out
>that
>over time (with lots of hot weather in San Diego), the center
>dielectric of
>the cable had migrated (pulled back) relative to the connector body.
>The
>male-N pin thus had retracted about 3/16 inch, and separated from the
>female
>pin, even though the male pin at one time had been in the right
>position.
K1VR: Curious. I discovered the same problem last winter here. When
things got REALLY cold last February, my 40 meter beam stopped working.
The problem turned out to be that an N connector splice in the K1XX
asynchronous transformer (to feed a 50 ohm beam with 75 ohm hardline) had
experienced this "n-connector pullback". The inner body of the N
connector, on the female side, had retracted and was no longer making
contact. Instead of attributing it to warm weather, as Glen K6NA does, I
had attributed it to cold weather. However, at that time, someone wrote
me that he had discovered the same problem in several places with N
connectors on RG-213 at KN8Z, where the N connectors were taped
vertically to a tower leg (as was true in my case). So it may be an N
connector problem, not a weather problem.
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