Hi, all.
As some of you know, I have been struggling witha Carolina Windom 160
Compact installation over the past few weeks, with little success,
especially when it has come to getting on 160 meters.
The lowest SWR I could get on the band was about 8.0 to 1.
Jim Thompson from RadioWorks (the company who makes the antenna), is trying
to help me troubleshoot the situation, and he has some ideas which a ham
friend and I are going to try tomorrow, weather permitting.
Anyway, one quick suggestion he made to me was to take a coil of about 100
feet of RG8X coax, and put it between the transmitter and my Tentech 238A
manual tuner. He said that this length is about a quarter wave on 160
meters, and might get my sWR down some.
Well, I did this, and it took the SWR down to about 5 to 1 in the center of
the band--around 1.850 MHZ.
The antenna still wouldn't tune with the auto tuner in the TS480, but it
actually tuned with the Tentech 238 manual tuner.
I realize that all I was doing was reducing the SWR by introducing loss into
the antenna, but I thought I'd try to make a few contacts anyway, just to
see if it would be possible.
The Canadian RAC contest is going on this week-end, so I made 2 CW contacts
with no trouble at all. Then, for the heck of it, I went to the SSB portion
of 160, and made a contact with an Ontario station using only 100 watts. I
asked for an honest signal report, and he says I was 10 over S9 into
Ontario.
This surprised the heck out of me, since I know the antenna can't be that
efficient, but if nothing else, I can now say I've been on 160 meters for
the first time in my ham career.
Now, if I can get the antenna itself to perform better, without taking such
crazy measures, I'll be in good shape for the NAQP contests in January.
I know that I have reached this milestone in a rather unorthadox way, but I
just felt the need to share it with my fellow list members.
I'll let you know how things go tomorrow when we get back to some real
antenna tweaking.
73 from Tom Behler: KB8TYJ, Big Rapids, MI
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