[Today’s run: 5 miles]<\/p>\n
Last night I tried to get on 40 meters (~ 7 MHz ) and do some radio stuff.\u00a0 But my antenna would not tune up correctly.<\/p>\n
After a few trips outside with the flashlight, I decided it wasn’t going to be something I could fix in the dark at 10 pm.<\/p>\n
This morning I got back at it.\u00a0 Turned out it was the part of the system most recently disturbed\u00a0 (no big surprise there).\u00a0 When I soldered a connector on the feedline months ago, I must have nicked the solid-wire center conductor of the coax pretty badly.\u00a0 Taking it off from the bulkhead connector at the house, like I did a couple of weeks ago, must have put enough twist on it to break that center conductor.\u00a0 I was trying to transmit with a break in the transmission line from the house to the antenna.\u00a0 That won’t work.<\/p>\n
I was glad to find the problem close to the house.\u00a0 It is a bit more challenging to do soldering work out at the base of the tower, 100′ from the nearest electrical outlet.\u00a0 (I should get one of those little butane soldering irons, one of these days.)<\/p>\n
I chopped off the connector, got the old bits out of it and put it on the new end.\u00a0 Everything seems to be back in working order now.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
I’ve done some VHF operating the last few mornings.\u00a0 Yesterday there was a short opening into north-central Iowa.\u00a0 Today there was an opening into SW Louisiana. So I’ve added two new grids to my VHF map.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Today’s run: 5 miles] Last night I tried to get on 40 meters (~ 7 MHz ) and do some radio stuff.\u00a0 But my antenna would not tune up correctly. After a few trips outside with the flashlight, I decided it wasn’t going to be something I could fix in the dark at 10 pm. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ham-radio","category-operating"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2743"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2745,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2743\/revisions\/2745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}