05-03-2022, 06:01 PM
05-15-2022, 05:57 PM
Alas .. I was all set up on HF and ready to give it a try, but found my OCF dipole was un-usable. Normally I have 160 thru 10 with minimal SWR but was out of luck for this QSO party. Murphy strikes !!
Over the weekend finally found the problem. Antenna was fine .. the 5 year old HF in line tuner had a bad solder joint on one end of the variable roller inductor. Weird that it affected the SWR even when I had the tuner in it's bypass position. Also weird it failed after 5 years of very low power use .. never over 100 watts. The solder joint wasn't burned or discolored etc. It just separated itself from the coil winding. Cleaned and re-tinned and re-soldered the joint and all is fine again.
Over the weekend finally found the problem. Antenna was fine .. the 5 year old HF in line tuner had a bad solder joint on one end of the variable roller inductor. Weird that it affected the SWR even when I had the tuner in it's bypass position. Also weird it failed after 5 years of very low power use .. never over 100 watts. The solder joint wasn't burned or discolored etc. It just separated itself from the coil winding. Cleaned and re-tinned and re-soldered the joint and all is fine again.