When things dont go right it can be frustrating but when things are like my activation recently they are downright demoralizing…
So I had an evening free and wanted to do some POTA so I decide to setup in the truck with my hamsticks … since it is faster… you know since everything is ready to go. Little did I know what I was about to get into.
So I goto the frisbee golf parking area and get everything out to do an in-truck activation. This is how I operate if it is raining and has worked well for me in the past. I just tape a “rain shield” to the coax connector made from a peanut package with both ends cut out. Haha, reuse at its finest. But today, I didnt need it since it was not raining.
Next I break out the Ten Tec Argonaut 5 and my N3ZN cw key and connect it with my HamGadgets PicoKeyer and I am all set. Another thing with today is I planned to activate with my 8Ah LiFePO4 battery to see if it can handle an activation with the Argonaut 5. I have my inline power meter this time so I can monitor the voltage too. I also can monitor Amp/hour usage but completely forgot to do this since I got wrapped up in other things. I setup this kit in the cab of the truck as you see so that I could sit comfortably while being in the truck. This works really well when I am solo, but gets tougher if I bring someone with me. As you can see below it was up to almost 3 Ah by the time I took this photo. I wished I had thought to get a photo of it at the end to have that data. I guess I will have to do it again… lol.
But before all this got started I connected my antenna and wanted to check the SWR before starting as I have been experimenting with the radials some here lately and have learned some interesting things about them. I get out my nanoVNA and connect it to the antenna and it shows like it isn’t there…at all. I mess with the VNA a while and try to see if it might have a loose adapter on the VNA or if the calibration might have been done wrong, which I found not to be the case after calibrating it again… Nothing in the VNA was wrong, so I get out of the truck and inspect the antenna and it looks right, nothing is out of the ordinary. I go back and get my trusty little multimeter and decide to ohm the center pin of the coax to the shield to see what it measures, it should be open to the meter…it isn’t, quite the opposite actually, it is shorted. So I immediately go to the antenna and disconnect my brand new, reputable brand coax and check it with it removed from the antenna, it measures good now. Whew! That was close! I didn’t want my new coax to be bad right out of the chute.
So now that I am pretty sure it isn’t the coax, I turn my attention to the antenna. I remove the radiator and test the base to center pin and it reads shorted!! What in the world is going on here!?!? I look closely at the mount, which at this point has the BNC to PL259 adapter on it and nothing else and so I remove the top portion of the antenna mount to make sure water has not entered the plate where it passed through and has created a path with corrosion to the mount. Nope, not there, it looks perfect.
So I remove the adapter and the short goes away immediately. I reinstall it and it returns. I remove the adapter and check it and it measures fine and so does the antenna mount now. What gives? Well, I had a new adapter I picked up at the hamfest from the Wireman and I just installed it to see what would happen. The problem vanished. I tried wiggling the antenna and the coax and pushed and pulled on the adapter and the meter didn’t change a bit, all I can figure is that something in the other adapter is shorting when the adapter bottoms out on the antenna mount at the point where it gets tight.
This is what went bad. On the surface from every angle it looks perfect, but when tightened in place it produces a dead short across the antenna to ground. Don’t blindly think that simple things like this can’t fail. Obviously they can. I will be more diligent in checking my system routinely too. The Argonaut 5 has no SWR meter on it, which is pretty much the only thing about it I don’t like, so I have to use other means of monitoring the SWR. The VNA was that tool today.
Once that was sorted out, I was able to get on the air and make some contacts. Since I was dancing with the end of the UTC day, I figured I would start on 20 meters to improve my odds of getting an activation before the day flips over. The hunters came in clutch and I EASILY made the activation. Once I cleared all the calling stations, I QSYed to 17 meters to see what I could do there as the band was open earlier…before I found the bad antenna adapter…
Turns out 17 meters right during grey line to the west coast will net some cool contacts. All but one are from the west coast and that is always fun as I rarely get to work California due to noise on the bands. All in all, I netted 41 contacts in the log all before the UTC day ended. So it all worked out anyway. Moral to the story is two fold. The first one is to take extra parts for your system and two is don’t assume anything… this adapter looked perfect visually but did not work when installed. Have fun y’all and I hope to hear you on the air soon.
PS: Another perk to working POTA is things like these photos I grabbed of the clouds. You normally don’t see these at home in the house. If I had stayed home or threw in the towel on the antenna (which I almost did) I would not have seen these beautiful sunset clouds.
73 de WK4DS