Another terrific winter storm this week and unfortunately the Moxon suffered somewhat even though the mast was placed in the tilt position. The aluminium is pretty flimsy stuff and any hard knocks will put it out of place, so with wind gusts of 60mph it will certainly affect the antenna in some way. On closer inspection the gap between the driven element and reflector has moved and it was noticeable when rotating the antenna that in some cases I was getting better reception with the antenna facing away from the target!
Once the storm had died down and I did some quick checks and quickly realised what the problem was and so will attempt to rectify this weekend. It’s most annoying though; my Ebay antenna analyzer has still not turned up, no doubt caught up with all the Christmas mail, so I cannot do any major alterations until it arrives. One other thought came to my attention which had completely passed me by was the fact that the boom was still longer than required, (see photo), but in all honesty I’m not sure that it would effect the antenna, however logic dictates that it shouldn’t be there so I will trim to the required length adjust the spacers and hopefully the forward gain will return.
At present all antennas except one are tied down purely for protection from the recent storms. The cobweb is fairly easy to drop as it is on a retractable mast and the only time consuming part is readjusting the guy ropes. The W3DZZ was replaced last week for maintenance as the balun needed some taping up and I wanted to check the traps were still aligned to their correct frequecies. So I had raised up the old Carolina Windom as a temporary stop gap and decided to leave it up during the storm so at least I had some form of communication available and all things considered it is working reasonably well.
I’m still having great thoughts of building a yagi for 10m in the spring, but sourcing the aluminium is a proving difficult as trade suppliers want vast amounts of money....Typical!!
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