[TowerTalk] TH-3 JR.

[Eric Moore]

Hello Guys,
I put up my first beam 3 weeks ago (for THE contest) and was very
disappointed with the results.  My SWR was terrible 2.5+ in the Ham
bands. Before I installed it, I went thru all of the traps and cleaned
them, replaced the trap caps with new, cleaned the alum. tubing with
scothbright pad (and alot of elbow grease), and replaced all the
hardware with Stainless steel. When I went thru the traps, they looked
OK, I am going to go back thru them and replace the coil screws, as some
are a little rusty, and I did not replace them before.  I checked the
resistence across the traps and they all mesured between 1-10ohms.  I am
getting a grid-dip osscilator to check for proper values. I believe the
values are on the telex website.  My questions to the group are:

1.  How do I check the balun?

2.  Should I just get rid of the balun and feed the antenna direct.

3.  What else should I check?

4.  What tuning options are available with this antenna.

More Background:
I had the antenna installed at about 35' above the ground.
I am feeding it with 9913 (to a short run of 8X at the rotor).
The dims were exact, per the directions Linda at Hygain sent me.
SWR readings were taken with a MFJ-259 with a "dip" in SWR at about
13.8MHZ down to 2:1
The readings were not as bad as the MFJ-259 when looking at the SWR
meter on my FT-757AT tuner (in bypass mode), but were still bad.
The ant. has the long wire matching system on the boom.
This is an older beam I got at a swap.

Thanks for all the help.
I know you guys will think of lots of other things to check.
73 de kc8cca
Eric


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