[TowerTalk] 4-squares on the wrong band

[Mike Smith VE9AA]

All.

 

A local mentioned to me his Tribander was broken and he’d been using his 40m 4-square on 20m…something I had never tried.

 

Today I tried feeding 20m RF into my 40m 4-square.  The SWR was too high to appease my amplifier with much more than 350watts out, the amp would kick out.  I suspect it would’ve eventually gone up higher as the dump resistor (dummy load) outside heated up, so I quit after a few transmissions.  Might’ve worked fed through an antenna tuner….not sure.

 

The strange thing is….on some signals (USA mostly, as I did this late afternoon)….the 40m 4-square actually was stronger on 20m receive than the proper 20m 4-square.  

I am not sure whether to put this down to arrival angles to/fr the Ionosphere, beam direction (QTF) or a poorly working 20m 4-square.  My 20m array never seems to be as loud on 20m as others in the area using tribanders. (I’ve done hundreds of comparisons using the RBN post-contest) The previous owner told me the same.

 

There was quite a noticeable difference on some signals, but exactly equal on others.

I heard a Missouri station CQing a good long while and he was a good S-unit louder on the 40m 4-square, as he CQ’d away on 14MHz.  The MO stn was ~2300km/1425mi from here (ie: 1 x F2 hop more or less)

 

I tried changing beam directions on the 40m array and couldn’t get a good sense of what the pattern was like on 20m….mostly there was no big change in signal strength but I didn’t play with it for very long.

 

I also tried feeding 20m rf into my 80m 4-square, where the SWR was better, but signals were obviously weaker using the 80m unit on 20m.  I have used my 160m inverted L on various higher bands when antennas were broken here.  About the same results.

 

Anyways…just a data point or two.  Strange as it was.

 

Mike VE9AA

 

Mike, Coreen & Corey

Keswick Ridge, NB