General Update

I think I may have gone over the top with ground radials, but from what I gather there is never enough! Clearing out one of the sheds the other day I found some old chicken wire and realised it would be another excellent ground radial for the 30 meter vertical and so took it round the back of the garden unrolled it and connected up. I checked the swr and it’s still at 1:4 but the resistance is now a healthy 38 ohms. It’s very noticeable however when there has been a good downpour the antenna behaves so much better, and the resistance drops to around 36 (the perfect score) obviously damp ground plays such a huge part with vertical antennas.

It seems that the bands have been fairly quiet recently, certainly when having a quick listen 10 and 12 meters have not been as good as the previous month. Although unfortunately through work commitments I have had little time to concentrate on playing with the radio.

I still have not had the chance to service the cobweb, but in the meantime managed to purchase some more speaker cable (42strands as per the original instructions) so that should the need arise I have plenty of spare available. When I do actually get round to the service I will take some pictures so as you can see the build, (I never did post picture when building the antenna).

 Further tests on the FL2000b amplifier have shown that everything is running well and the amp is far more stable, no doubt from replacing the damaged resistor within the parallel choke. I've now had it up and running to 300 watts on all the bands and so far good reports have been recieved which is excellent news.

I've been getting itchy feet again within the antenna department and I’d really like to have a go at building some kind of antenna for 160 but have the usual problem of not enough room. To do this I would have to replace one of the existing antennas otherwise the garden would begin to look like a mess and certain family members could well complain! The obvious choice is the W3DZZ, which is currently covering 80 and 40 meters, I will look in to seeing if I can add another trap for 160. Further updates to follow.