Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Transmit Issues

I used to have a Radiowavz 20m dipole in the attic hooked up using RG8X mini feed line to a Palstar PM2000A SWR/Wattmeter that went to my Icom 746Pro.

     20mdipole     PM2000A

I was able to use this combo on 10meters and and when I had friends over that had General or Extra class licenses it went out on 20m with very low SWR. On 10m the SWR with the built in antenna tuner was around 2.1 but it got me a QSL card!

I now have a Dr. Dipole 20m antenna hooked up the same way and tests on 20m gets SWR over 4 with little output showing on the watt meter. Use the built in antenna tuner and power output goes up but so does SWR! Doesn’t make sense does it? What to do about it? Get a dummy load and determine if it’s a radio problem or antenna problem. I haven’t read the best reviews on the MFJ dummy loads so I checked out Palstar reviews on eHam and the DL2K model got great feedback.

So I’m going to order one and see how it goes, I’ll report my findings when I have some time with it. Cross your fingers!

PalstarDL2K

3 comments:

  1. Hi Erik, Nice luxury dummyload from Palstar, little overkill I think. On the SWR issue I think you got kind of RF feedback on your SWR meter or you blew a diode inside the meter? Hope it is not your radio.
    73, Bas

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  2. Bas,

    Agreed, overkill but will come in handy. I tried it without the swr/wattmeter with similar results so we'll see.

    Thanks Bas

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete

I know some people like VE7KFM can't help themselves but if you feel the need to post as "Anonymous" add your name. For some reason he has no issue blasting his call on the air but online he is too frightened to do so, maybe he is afraid of what can happen, who knows, but for the rest of you, please leave a name or call, thanks.