[TowerTalk] BN86 - Skyhawk & TH7

[ac9s at mchsi.com]

Of Coure, just to balance the equation, in the big ice storm two years ago my 
Skyhawk broke its back (the boom broke) and my neighbor's TH7 came through 
unscathed.  All in all I would rather have to clean out the traps.  The 
Skyhawk was effectively ruined.

Keith
AC9S

Message: 8
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2008 11:30:21 -0400
From: "John Schaffner" <k8ln at neo.rr.com>
Subject: [TowerTalk] Re; Any BN-86 Balun Replacement Suggestions?
To: "TowerTalk" <towertalk at contesting.com>
Message-ID: <000a01c89a56$9f9339b0$6501a8c0 at John>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-1"

Eric ,I had a problem several years ago with my TH7dxx. High swr only on 15 
most 
of the time and after rain 10 would be effected and in time 20 too. After a 
good 
dry out, this took days, things would return to normal. At first I went the 
way 
of replacing baluns with no effect. Take a look at  
http://w8lky.org/images/06.jpg  this is the picture of one trap, you will see 
what caused my high swr. The traps became full of insects and grass. When wet 
weather came this caused the packing in the trap to short out the trap causing 
the swr to shift.  Wet is something we in Ohio are used to. At 70 feet you 
would 
think critters would not nest in a trap. Why did they like 15 meter traps 
better 
that the 20's? Someone here on the reflector might know! The process of 
replacing baluns, feed line and finally taking down the antenna took me months 
but after blowing out all the traps everything was back to normal. I did 
experience the same problem again 4 years later. The solution was replacing
  the TH7 with a SkyHawk, no traps. 

Every one is probably asking didn't he have the drain holes down? Yes I did, 
the 
trap full of junk soaked up water like a sponge.

Cant say this is your problem but it raises a red flag here.

Good luck
John
K8LN