[SECC] New Beverage at W8FN

[Randy Farmer]

Since I don't have a transmit antenna for 160 meters, I spent some time 
just listening in the 160 contest. Friday night I heard several EU 
stations quite well, but I was plagued by the noise problem, which shows 
up as ugly humps of noise with about 60 kHz spacing (a sure sign of crap 
from a switch mode power supply). Saturday night I went to work and 
discovered to my relief that it was self-inflicted. It turns out that 
the noise was coming from my 12V accessory power supply, which does have 
a SMPS in it. I've been using that same supply for many years to run all 
my station accessories without noticing the noise before. For the first 
time, my receive noise level on 160 meters is low enough to make the 
noise very obvious. I fixed the problem by ripping out the cheap 
internal supply and wiring in a Samlex SEC-1235 supply I had lying 
around as a standby. With the noise gone, it became easy to hear weak 
signals all across the band. I didn't stay up late, but it seemed the EU 
signals were few and far between Saturday night.

After lots of listening and switching directions on the NE-SW Beverage 
over the last week, I'm even more impressed with its performance. As a 
matter of fact, I now have a second kit on order to put up another one 
running SE-NW, and I'm busily building a switch box to give me 
switchable coverage in four quadrants.

73...
Randy, W8FN

On 12/2/2020 12:29 PM, Randy Farmer wrote:
> I have no 160 meter antenna so far, so I just spent a few minutes 
> listening on 160 meters. I was able to hear some EU stations on the 
> Beverage quite well. Unfortunately, I also found that there was some 
> kind of ugly local electrical noise on 160 that I'll need to track 
> down and get fixed before I can expect to do anything on that band.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.contesting.com/pipermail/secc/attachments/20201206/772f6003/attachment.html>