SRHuston Dot Net

I’m singing this note ’cause it fits in well with the chords I’m playing
I can’t pretend there’s any meaning hidden in the things I’m saying

–The Who, “Getting In Tune”

A long long time ago.. back when I wrote here a little more regularly, or at least tried to, I talked about some problems I was having with the tuner for my HF station. The first part of that story was posted here. Well, technically I guess the first part is this post, but that took place the day after the other one because I don’t always think linearly. Anyway, after all of that ended – which was some time later – I wrote a draft to just put a bow on the whole thing, and around that time stepped away from posting entirely. I kept looking at the draft now and then when I’d login but didn’t write it up. When I recently revitalized things I wondered if I should delete these draft posts, and I did take some of them away, but this is one I figured I could still write up and be relevant. So let’s finally end this thing, shall we? At least I hope it’s ended, I haven’t been using my HF station for a while lately and with my occasional luck I won’t be surprised to find a new gremlin took residence somewhere.

The tuner left my house around the end of March 2021, and I got notification from MFJ that they had it. Some weeks went by and there was no word, so I reached out to ask for a status update. They got back to me saying that apparently one guy was the one to work on them, and he had a backlog to get through and hadn’t got to mine yet. They promised an update, which I seem to recall they didn’t deliver on time, and I think I sent yet another follow-up asking for information only to receive a shipping notification that it was on the way back to me. I never did get any word on what was actually wrong, just a couple hand-scrawled notes about replaced components that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but the tuner was back in my hands three months later. I remounted it and it seemed to be working better, but not for long. Strange problems like the SWR would bounce between infinite and 1:1 while tuning, on almost a regular period like something was swaying in and out of the way. Whatever it was, I wasn’t happy – I’d spent three months waiting for this to be fixed, was told it was fixed, and it was most certainly Not Fixed.

I’d been hanging out in IRC with a group of hams, and a smaller group of them who are somewhat local to me, and come October I grumbled about my antenna problems in there. Three of the folks in channel – Andrew (KC2G), Chris (K2CR), and Jeremy (AC1LQ) – started walking me through some troubleshooting steps. I knew I was too “in the middle” of it and greatly appreciated an outside look, so I took their advice and reconnected the old unun transformer that I originally bought with the antenna. Back then, I used an antenna tuner inside the house, plus with a specific length of coax the whole system worked well and I was able to operate 160-6m. But trying to do that here wasn’t working as well, at least in part because I didn’t have the same length of coax between the tuner and the antenna anymore (which would change what point a standing wave node would be, and makes the tuner easier able to adjust – though it doesn’t do anything for the signal coming in or going out). So I figured the solution was to get a tuner that is as close to the mismatch as possible – right at the antenna – and that might help things to work better. Only, it wasn’t working out so great after all.

Back to the present, I hooked the unun up as close to how it was back when I first setup the antenna. Then, the whole length of the antenna was “hot” and the ground only connected to the ground plane and wires run along the grass. When the new tuner kit installed, one step was to isolate the bottom most antenna section and make that part of ground, and then everything from that above is hot. This shortens the antenna by one section, but supposedly is the better way to run it – I wonder if it’s because that’s also where the tuner mounts, and it keeps RF from being radiated right into the side of the tuner that way. Either way, the tuner is now seeing the entirety of the mismatched antenna right at its inputs. So by installing the unun and connecting that, then running through the tuner, now the unun will take up some of the mismatch before the tuner gets to it. Headed back into the shack to test things out, and .. eureka! The tuner was working much better, on all bands except 160m (to this day I still have no good way to tune up there, though I have ideas I just haven’t got around to trying to build something for it).

I made one more trip outside to reset the tuner’s memories completely, since I’d now mucked with the whole antenna system to the point that any learned tunings for a frequency would have to be relearned. To do that you have to open the case and have power applied while holding down certain buttons inside the case – the tuner is basically the same as the desktop model but without a meter or display of any kind, but the button switches still exist on the circuit board. Anyway, while I have it open and am looking at it, I found something else too:

Turns out when it came back to me, the ground lug that connects to the ground for the antenna was never soldered. It’s just barely touching there, and probably making sporadic contact (and arcing I’ll bet too). Not an issue now that I’m using the coax connector to talk to the antenna, but when it was connected through that lug, I definitely wasn’t getting a good ground. Pretty good chance that was around 90% of the problems that I had when I set things back up, and of course I didn’t catch it because why would I open the tuner and look inside when I got it back from being repaired? Ugh.

Now I just need to get on the radio more often and make all this worth it. As mentioned, this all happened in 2021, and by the time it was all wrapped up I had just started to fall out of radio again. Made some contacts in February ’22, and again in October ’22, then a smattering in ’23 and ’24 but nothing much. Maybe with the recently upgraded audio board, cleaned off workbench, and a little rearranging of things in the shack, I’ll get back on the air again.