19-03-2019, 06:13 AM
Marcus
Don't be concerned if I didn't hear you on Saturday. The local static crashes were up to S9 and over for quite a bit of the afternoon, and much of the east coast was similarly being battered by the storm noises. In the brief pauses when there weren't crashes, my s-meter was down around S2-3. Some stations were easy to work, others quite hard.
I was running my IC7400 - so 100W PEP with internal ATU - into my full-size 160 / 80 / 40 / 30 ray dipole set maximised for North-South (where most of the stations were) while the East-West set would have been better to work you. Otherwise our stations were fairly equivalent.
If you were hearing well but not transmitting well then I would harp back to your balun behaving poorly. I had that effect when running FT8 last year while portable - the raw SWR was rising with transmit time as the ferrite core got hot. The heating of the core was such that the ABS enclosure box was reasonably warm and the toroid was mid-air inside. The fix was a bigger toroid that didn't saturate, re-wound and (just) housed in the same balun box. The FT240-61 cores are good up to about 1KW SSB but lower powers on the likes of FT8. Search for FT240-61 on my web site.
One of the best things about AR : you get to experiment.
Don't be concerned if I didn't hear you on Saturday. The local static crashes were up to S9 and over for quite a bit of the afternoon, and much of the east coast was similarly being battered by the storm noises. In the brief pauses when there weren't crashes, my s-meter was down around S2-3. Some stations were easy to work, others quite hard.
I was running my IC7400 - so 100W PEP with internal ATU - into my full-size 160 / 80 / 40 / 30 ray dipole set maximised for North-South (where most of the stations were) while the East-West set would have been better to work you. Otherwise our stations were fairly equivalent.
If you were hearing well but not transmitting well then I would harp back to your balun behaving poorly. I had that effect when running FT8 last year while portable - the raw SWR was rising with transmit time as the ferrite core got hot. The heating of the core was such that the ABS enclosure box was reasonably warm and the toroid was mid-air inside. The fix was a bigger toroid that didn't saturate, re-wound and (just) housed in the same balun box. The FT240-61 cores are good up to about 1KW SSB but lower powers on the likes of FT8. Search for FT240-61 on my web site.
One of the best things about AR : you get to experiment.
Doug VK4ADC @ QG62LG51
http://www.vk4adc.com
This Forum is only going to be as interesting as the posts it contains.
If you have a comment or question, post it as it may trigger or answer the query in someone else's mind.
http://www.vk4adc.com
This Forum is only going to be as interesting as the posts it contains.
If you have a comment or question, post it as it may trigger or answer the query in someone else's mind.