I had some issues with the 10m LFA beam last contest. I noticed the SWR was quite high but the antenna was still working. Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate, it has been raining almost every day for weeks now. But today we have seen the sun this afternoon, temperature was reasonable. Time to lower the tower to see what was actually wrong. Well, it wasn't that difficult. For some unknown reason an element of the first director went loose. It almost fell off the antenna since there was only 1 cm of the tube still in the center tube. I removed the director tube, cleaned it and slide it in place again. I made shure it doesn't come loose this time. I put the tower back up and tested SWR. Long time I had such a good SWR over 1 MHz bandwidth.
It might be a good idea to give this antenna some big maintance in summer.
I took the opportunity to make some QSOs on the band. Did have some nice contacts in to the US, all with good signals. I broke a pile-up to KP2B on Virgin Islands. Besides that I made some nice QSOs on FT4. The 4 element LFA is a very good performer.
2 comments:
Good morning Bas it's good to read the issue was easy to find and repair. I did not know the Icom 7300 had an SWR spectrum feature that is very nice to have. The 7610 does not have this but would had been nice to have.
73,
Mike
VE9KK
Hello Mike, the IC-7610 does not have it? I'm really surprised! Even my IC-706MK2G had this, only with 5 bars instead of the 13 you see on the photo. So I checked the manual and indeed nothing about this feature. I think this is absolutely a cool feature I use a lot when checking my antennas. 73, Bas
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