[CQ-Contest] Active antenna tuners

[Art Boyars]

N5OT quipped:

"I understand his station was taken out by a tornado.  All they could find
was the 12 inch cooling duct from the top of his final."

Here's a real story from a few weeks ago.

I was on 75M looking for a certain Baltimore net.  No luck; the band was
too "long".  But I did find another group of guys chatting near the freq,
and I read the mail while I tuned for the Baltimore net.  They were mostly
in NJ and NY.  With one of the stations, every time he came on there was a
"clunk!", and some pretty bad hum on his audio.  After a few minutes the
band started to get too long for them, too, and they went to QSY to 160M.

I took the opportunity to call the guy with the hum and tell him about it.
He replied:

"(Clunk!) Yes, it's acoustic hum from my plate transformer."

Well, he was, in fact, pretty loud.

73, Art K3KU