Out with the old

Well the old, rather poor quality Sirio Boot (trunk) antenna mount on my car finally gave up a few weeks back. I used this mount for my VHF antenna. The Coax connection came adrift inside the mount. I had been meaning to change it for some time anyway so no problem. Actually there was a problem. Not only was the mount rusted on top and looking pretty nasty, the allen screws underneath which grip the bottom of the boot lip had rusted solid! Nothing would shift them! The answer? My trusty hacksaw- I had to carefully cut the mount of. Lukily I managed to avoid damaging the car.
I replaced the mount with an unbranded one obtained from Ebay, model number MB400. It looks a lot sturdier than the Sirio but time well tell. In any event it is unlikely to last as long as the Diamond mount holding my HF mobile whip, that must be around 20 years old. Those mounts are around £60 new though so for now I will try the MB400!!

Up Up and Away...............

Today I finally removed the Wellbrook receive loop which has been hanging in the shack window for the last 18 months. It worked there, better than I thought it would but it was well down in terms of signal strength compared to my wire doublet.
It is now on top of the pole at the end of my garden at a height of 20 feet or so and in the clear. I havent had much chance to test it but it seems to work better up there but not THAT much better. The Western HF 10 doublet is a far better receive antenna on all bands other than top band and medium wave. Still given the size of the loop it is quite an impressive performer.

Surprise DX!

At home a little earlier than usual this afternoon I decided to take an hour out in the shack. 15 metres seemed quite active so I set up the FT1000MP on PSK31 and worked UR4UM  which confirmed everything was working OK since i changed soundcards on this machine.
I left the rig monitoring the bands whilst I pottered about in the shack. Nothing unusual on the screen, mainly European stations with the occasional Stateside signal to be seen. Then I noticed HI8CSS calling CQ from Dominican Republic. I called him, not expecting a reply as surely there would be a pile up and I was running 20 watts into my doublet. He came back to me instantly with a 599 report and I had 100% copy on him. So a new country for me and quite a shock too!

Antenna maintenance

Over the past few days or so I had noticed that the performance of my HF wire antenna (the Western HF 10) had changed. The SWR was higher than usual where it was resonant on parts of 80, 20 and 10 metres the SWR was now 3:1. The rigs auto ATU still tuned it ok on most bands but the receive seemed a little down too.
A physical inspection of the antenna itself showed nothing obviously wrong. I then disconnected the Coax feed at the antenna end and replaced the antenna with a dummy load. The dummy load showed 3:1 SWR. So the fault was in the coax or maybe the PL259 plug. Not surprising perhaps in view of the very heavy rain and substantial snowfall we have had here over the past month.
So out came the soldering iron and off came the PL259.

You may just be able to make out the corrosion on the plug in the picture, the body of the plug also looked a little bit tarnished. It seems water had found its way in even though the plug had been given a good covering with self amalgamating tape. Luckily trimming the coax back a few centimetres showed that water had not got that far. A new plug was soldered on and reconnecting, weatherproofed as much as possible and the antenna was back to normal! Thankfully an easy fix.

Snow!

Pictured is how my HF doublet looked first thing this morning! Covered in snow which had fallen overnight (as foercasted) and the wire sagging badly. South Wales has seen some heavy snow in the past 24hours making travelling difficult. So no work for me today!
A quick shake of the antenna feeder got rid of the snow by the way and the antenna is back to normal.
So today I have some extra time and have started reorganising the shack.

60 Metres

Today I applied online for a notice of Variation to my licence to enable me to operate on 60 metres. The NOV was granted seconds after applying so it seems the intention is now to grant an NOV to any full licence holders that wish it.
The NOV gives us in the UK 11 frequencies that can be used on 5mhz.
Interestingly enough initial experiments show that this is one band that my Western HF10 doublet doesnt like - tuning is extremely tricky even with an external ATU. Although keeping the power down seems to improve matters.  It seems if I want to use this band I am going to need to rig up an alternative antenna.

Shortwave Listening.

I managed to do quite a bit of shortwave listening over the past weekend and have been putting my new SDR4+ receiver through its paces. Rather than clog up this post with my ramblings about my new toy you can click here to find out a bit more about it.
Suffice it to say I am rather impressed with this little rig!