Sudden ‘HI SWR’ Display, Why?

 Yesterday I was trying to check in to AIRNET India at 7.30 pm and I could hear the net control very strong, at 5,9+20 dB. Pressed the PTT to announce my callsign when the call for any more check-ins came through. Immediately 'HI SWR' was displayed in the meter in red colour and there was no output from the radio. Tried tuning with built-in auto tuner of FT-710 and the tuner refused to tune. Switched to 21 MHz and tried auto tuning and it did tune to one frequency. I was confused and went outside to check the antenna. As it was dark, I first checked the portion of the antenna wire and mast from the front side and it seemed OK. At second thought, I went on to the first floor terrace and checked and there it was, the other limb of the 40m dipole was down! The nylon thread which had been used to tie the antenna had given way. So the lesson is, whenever you see a 'HI SWR' display on your screen with a previously functioning antenna, go out and check the antenna in full.  Waited till today morning, though I was quite eager to have my 40m antenna up, as I did not want to go the backyard at night with mosquitoes and possibly even little snakes! 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is LMR SDR?

Image
See also (new post):   Standalone Versions of LMR SDR!  I have been hearing about LMR SDR during discussions among homebrewers for the past few days on 40m. Thought of learning a bit about it and my web searches told me that some of the persons behind the development of LMR SDR are YE3CIF, UT3MK and F5NPV. F5NPV has given detailed descriptions about homebrewing LMR SDR on his webpage, including videos. Even though I did look at the pages of YE3CIF and UT3MK, they seem to be in regional languages. I could not find the expansion of LMR on those pages, though I presume that it would stand for land mobile radio. LMR cables which many of us use were initially designed for land mobile radio. SDR stands for Software Defined Radio like my FT-710, which uses software to do many of the functions done by hardware in the conventional superheterodyne radio receiver . It is interesting to note that LMR SDR covers from 160m to 10m band, that is the whole amateur radio HF bands. There are a few frie
Read more

Building a Tape Measure Yagi for LEO Satellite Operations

Image
 The Moxon Yagi which I have been using for my LEO Satellite operations had a Moxon rectangle for VHF and five UHF Yagi elements which were passively coupled to the VHF Moxon driven element. The gain was not that high when I thought of working SO-121 QRP satellite. VU2TEK had good success with his Tape Measure Yagi which motivated me to go for one. But I don't expect the same success as he was operating outdoors, pointing the Tape Measure Yagi in the direction of the satellite pass. I am planning to use only in a mast mounted fashion which will limit its usability for satellite passes to a short period of about 4 minutes. I have chosen the DK7ZB design which I have been looking at for a quite a long time. That design has 5 elements for VHF and 8 elements for UHF with a boom length of about 1.5m. First step was to get a wooden reaper to use as the boom. Earlier it used to be available in all electrical wiring accessories shops. But now with the usage of PVC channels for wiring, I w
Read more

Six Button Wireless Mouse vs Three Button Mouse

Image
 When I started using computers long back, mouse had only two buttons, a left and a right button. Then came three button mouse with an extra scroll button. I have read that there was also a single button mouse, but I have not seen one. Now here is a six button mouse, that too a wireless mouse with a USB-A Nano Dongle and 2.4 Ghz wireless connection. In the earlier era, mouse had a rolling ball which would gather dirt and sometimes stop functioning well. Now we have optimal mouse which uses a red light source and an optical sensor instead of the rolling ball. The wireless mouse works on a single 1.5 V, AA battery with a projected battery life of one year!
Read more