TopBand: Maintenance...YES!

[km1h @ juno.com]

I'll try and keep it short.

The last real 160M QSO last season was 3/19/97 with 9M2AX. After that I
went pretty much into VHF mode. A few times during the Spring  I played
around a bit but got bad signal reports from a few ops.....Carl you are
all over the band, etc...and I was on CW. 

Well this weekend I got 160M religion and decided to look at A to Z.
Noticed that I had carriers all over 160, phased array VSWR was
different, etc. 

To make it short...I found broken solder joints (ground lead) on one of
the elevated verticals...plus the radials were mostly broken at the
connector and holding on by a few wires each. 
Redoing all connections, new radial leads (cut off 3" and redid them all)
and total cleaning it all up made it a new system. No more BC band IMD,
even on the TX antenna. I dont even hear the PC and dont even know where
those carriers came from (crystal steady, unmodulated, every
2-3KHz)....probably from some gear of my yuppie neighbors! 

Bottom line....take criticism seriously from the real topband ops. 
Wait at least 6 months to work on it. 
Monitor your system carefully...be suspect of any new
phenomenon...investigate.

73   Carl  KM1H  

Guess I got into a "if it works" attitude problem over the past few
years. 
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