I posted back in January to say that the 17m element on my Hexbeam had snapped in the storms and was causing problems. It took over three months before everything came together to allow me to get the mast down and repair it but I managed it last weekend, just in time for the CQ […]
Back in February, the UK was hit heavily by two overlapping storms, Ciara and Dennis and it was during these storms that my hexbeam took the hit that broke it. Here you can see the aerials being blown about badly and although I didn’t realise it at the time, the initial damage had already been […]
Nearly two weeks ago the UK suffered from ‘Severe storms’ with high winds across most of the country. I went outside in the rain on the Saturday morning, looked up at my aerial and was disappointed to see this. You can see the 40m element in the top is very loose and blowing freely in […]
At the end of July, I happened to glance up at my aerial and noticed the 15m element hanging down. It was broken. It didn’t look serious though and I was sure that it was just that the connector on the end of the element had snapped off. Around the same time, I was offered […]
With the title to this entry, I can imagine a collective sigh from my readers, followed by “Oh no, not again”. This time is different though, this time it was nothing to do with RF or with melted insulators. A few weeks ago I decided to add some anti-bird measures to my aerial consisting of […]
I’ve had this screenshot sitting on my desktop for a while because I think it’s quite interesting. It shows my 20m QRSS signal from when I switched the transmitter on, for a period of nearly four hours. You can see how it takes almost an hour to warm up and calibrate itself to the correct […]
I posted about three weeks ago about my Hexbeam failing again and you can read that by scrolling down the page a little or by clicking here. I spoke to the manufacturer directly after and he sent me a set of his new custom made PTFE spacers. There was a contest the following weekend so […]
It’s the EA PSK63 contest. I had a decent run yesterday and this morning I was up nice and early to carry on my 15m single band entry. It snowed overnight, it’s raining now and very damp outside. After twenty minutes I was working a run of Japanese stations and my IMD meter started beeping […]
I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently that I’d ordered a replacement aerial and it was delivered on Friday. I bought a G3TXQ designed Broadband Hexbeam, from Ant, MW0JXE. Ant manufactures these on demand and so therefore there’s a waiting list, it took around six weeks from order to delivery but it was well worth […]
There I was, at quarter past eight this morning calling CQ in the April Fools Day contest on 20m 😉 when I noticed that my SWR had gone from 1.1:1 to 3.5:1. Something was clearly wrong so I stopped calling straight away and started to investigate. The first thing I did was to tune around […]
