You may well ask!
So, everything became unexpectedly Tom & Dick after the last club night's rushed attempt to choke-off some perceived RF in the club shack. The diagnosis was subjective, but not unreasonable and likely correct to some degree, but after a handful of us attended the 'bunker' this morning, we discovered that there was more to it than a waft of Radio Frequency where it wasn't welcome.
Frankly, it's been a right dog's dinner in there since the major antenna work took place in the autumn, with no-one able to commit the time to straighten it out in a calm and logical manner like you would do in your own shack, but this morning we were determined to put that right.
Disappointingly, no-one thought to bring any breakfast, but I guess that just made us more motivated to get it finished, and after three hours, we were out of there.
Other than some serious tidying up and cable re-routing, I managed to re-house the KiwiSDR in its own plastic box (thanks to my local Chinese take-away) whilst Merv was rather insistent on wrapping it in aluminium foil - which would have looked much better in gold 😝 - but should help with shielding. I also re-soldered a nice BNC plug on the coax coming from the antenna in place of the ropey PL259 which was decidedly suspect and candidate #1 for the intermittent issues we've been having, to my mind. We also found a new home for everything up on the shelf, along with the WiFi access point/switch. I also stuck the RF protection unit and Wellbrook pre-amp together with some double-sided tape to help tame the writhing snake pit of mini-8 coax. I just need to make up a nice short link-cable to refine the job at my leisure.
Meanwhile, over in the Flex corner, Phil was doing battle with the rather odd problems on transmit. This seems to have got worse over the last few weeks, and wasn't resolved by the rooftop remedial work that was attempted a little while ago. A lot of diagnostic work and plenty of on-air testing determined that the radio was fine, and after cutting and re-soldering the coax plug a number of times, due in part to the discovery of some strange looking teeth-like marks in the coax (very odd, but now removed) it was decided to perform a continuity test on the antenna/coax.
This showed up an unexpected 62Ω resistance (should be very close to zero), indicating that there is something amiss with the antenna itself.
Unfortunately, this will entail another rooftop excursion to determine exactly what's going on. Phil will make sure he's in attendance when this happens, as he built it in the first instance and is best placed to see what's failed. Whilst this might be regarded as bad news, it's actually good to know that we found something wrong and can therefore fix it. Assuming we can also prevent a reoccurrence, it's got to be a positive result.
Between now and then, the Flex is only really useable on Rx, whilst the Kiwi is back in action and available via the Homepage banner once again.
Your friendly local news reporter, on the scene in Burgess Hill.
Berni M0XYF
