Steve and everyone who helped. I did make a partial contact last nght.
The band conditions were going from bad to worse last night. The
partial contact repeated my call but after that I couldn't pick him out
of all of the noise There was also a guy in Rhode Island that I wanter
to reach but every time he completed a contact there was a pile up. Any
way, I'll try again tonight. I did get the watt meter to work sort of.
I put theradio in rtty and flipped the transmit switch and got swr that
varied from 12:1 to 15:1. Forward and reflected power would get no
higher than about 23 watts. I wonder if an antena tuner would help
this?