[CQ-Contest] Minimal SO2R -- is spacing enough?
Doug Smith W9WI
w9wi at w9wi.com
Sat Aug 11 00:06:53 EDT 2001
> From: Pete Smith <n4zr at contesting.com>
>
> I'm contemplating SO2R for the first time. I have the two radios and a
> decent amount of real estate. My question, hoping to benefit from others'
> experience -- do I stand a chance of doing this on CW, relying solely on
> polarity diversity, low power on the second radio and distance between
> antennas? Or should I just assume the worst and plan on bandpass filters?
> For the second radio, I'm thinking of an R-5 or similar vertical, spaced
> about 300 feet from my yagis, running 100 watts.
I hung a Windom off my tower last fall shortly before CW SS. Radio 1 was an
IC-765 driving a C4 (40/20/15/10) at 22m and 160/80 dipoles sharing a common
feedline at 20m on the tower. The Windom was connected to Radio 2, a
TS-940. Ran low power on both radios.
I managed to burn out both radios. The 765 popped a diode. (apparently
this is a known problem as it's mentioned in the service bulletins I got
with the radio. It took less than $1 worth of parts to fix - and Icom has
no minimum order for parts. Very pleasant repair experience which will
cause this previous Kenwood-head to look much closer at Icom in the future.)
The '940 burned out a resistor in the 10dB attenuator, causing the 10dB
position to sound more like 25dB. Haven't bothered to fix that yet. (kinda
afraid to as I have another 940 that's suffering the same problem Wim is
having - and reseating connectors hasn't fixed it.)
I have since reconfigured the Windom to get the radiating parts further from
the tower. (the east end had been only about a meter from the tower. It's
now at least 10 meters away.) Haven't operated SO2R since doing that work
though so I don't know if it was enough to fix the problem. Probably won't
know until this year's SS. I'll bet it'll do the trick though.
--
Doug Smith W9WI
Pleasant View (Nashville), TN EM66
http://www.w9wi.com
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