Impatience

PB7Z Bernard told me so after I expressed my failed installation of the HF5B to him. He already has this antenna  for years in his tower which is the same one as I have. And he worked a impressive list of DXCC with the HF5B. He told me I'm too impatient and I told him I have limited time for my hobby. It took me a whole afternoon to install and tune the antenna and finally found it not working at all. I was really disappointed and asked Bernard if he could take the antenna to see if he could get it better. But in the end.....it was all my own fault.

So we are two days later. I was planning to do a quick swap. The HF5B out of the tower and my 10m HB9CV in there. But then I decided I should first check the cable to the tower. I got the coax cables from the shack to the tower. One is the LMR400 for VHF/UHF use. The other is the old H2007 which I used for the vertical before. I never checked the H2007 cable before and always thought I had connected it. So I plugged in a dummyload on the other side of the MT-isolator that is in the cabinet below the tower. And in the shack I did my analyser read out......no good SWR! What the....

I also had a extra piece of LMR400 to the garage in case I wanted to connect a third cable. That cable was connected to the MT-isolator when I installed all the coax cables. I always thought it was connected to the H2007 in the garage....so, I did check it out.....you see the result in the left picture. It wasn't connected to anything!

And the end of the H2007 cable was just behind the MT-isolator.....without
a connector soldered to it. See the picture on the right. This is really stupid! How could this be? How did I overlook this? Too impatient! I soldered a PL connector on the H2007 and checked the SWR in the shack. Now is was almost 1:1. Luckely I didn't remove the HF5B yet. So, I checked it again. And I found the SWR was reasonable below 1:2 on all 5 bands. Good enough to use the beam. Then I had some other things to do.

Well, the results late in the afternoon....I tried it with Bernard on 10m and it did well. I already tried it on 20m receive with almost equal results compared to the inverted-V only less noise. On 15m it did well, much better as my inverted-V. I discovered some propagation on 12m. And heard PY2UAF calling on SSB, a few calls and I was in his log. After that I tried 10m and 12m FT8. On 12m I did work 3B9FR from Rodriguez Isl.. So, despite the SWR is not as good as 1:1 the antenna is at least working. I can do with the antennatuner to get a good match for the radio.

Conclusion: The HF5B is a very sensitive antenna. Tuning can be a pain. In my case a SWR "dip" was hardly visible. But moving the dip was no problem. However to see what the real SWR is the antenna needs to be at height. And the most important thing of all, don't be too impatient!