DELARA at the

ARC

More station improvement

A while back, I took Stan's Hustler 5BTV Vertical Antenna that was erected at the edge of the bush on the east side of the building home with the intention of finding out why it wouldn't load on any band. I finally found that the 20M trap was off its recommended dimension by 4"!! After re-adjusting that, things fell into place pretty well across most bands. I took it up yesterday planning to put it back up in the same spot but the bush had other ideas. It had grown into the vertical space where the vertical would be so I had to "trim" it to make room (Picture 1). Once that was done, I secured the antenna to the post and was ready to hook the coax up to it and test it. Knowing Murphy shows up in places you're not expecting, I decided to hook a dummy load to the coax and test the run from inside the building. The SWR was infinite!!!! I found a connector splice at the corner of the building so I tested it each way from that point. The coax was fine from there into the building but was open from there to the antenna, This run of RG-213 was buried in the grass 2-3" deep. OK, here we go pulling up about 40' to find the problem. (Picture 2). The nicely sliced coax cut was about half way out to the antenna (Picture 3). Fortunately, I had brought a run of RG-213 with me to replace the entire run so I proceeded to rip out the old and put in the new. (Yeah, it was hot in the sun). Unfortunately, I didn't have a long enough run to make it the entire way (lacking about 15') so I made up another run, connected everything together and tested it. It now worked so I re- connected the 5 radials that were laying close to the base. It may need some further tweaking on the other bands but the SWR on 40 is close to 1:1. Picture 4 shows the completed installation. Hopefully, this is the last coax cut we'll find in the grass but who knows. Murphy is always lurking around waiting to make your day! An antenna change for ARES / VHF Craig (W8CR) brought the lift over to the ARC and with Stan as ground support, we replaced the VHF/UHF Log Periodic antenna on the west tower with a 2/440 beam. We then took the antenna support down that was on the east tower at about 40' and put a new 8' long 2x4 at the top of the tower. This allowed the 80M PH Inverted V to be farther away from the tower than before. SWR readings after putting the antenna back up showed a 1.1:1 at 3870. See attached pictures. The coax from this antenna is still connected to the 80M CW jumper going into the building for testing purposes. We also tighten up the GOTA dipole so it is now a little higher than it was.