I’m still having an issue with my G5RV as mentioned in my last post. I lowered the antenna today, pulled the coax back out and did a continuity test from pin to end and shield to end and it seemed all good. So I raised it back up and what do you know – I could tune on 80, 40, 20 and 10 again. Odd. I make a few 10m contacts and then see an interesting 20m station show up in the cluster so I tune to it and uh-oh, not again. Seems like I can’t tune 20m again. Ugh. Nothing changed in that short time other then a very slight breeze out today.

So I call a local club member that has an antenna analyzer and he calls me back later in the day and I run over and grab it. I connect the coax and 20m looks good with a low SWR and 50 ohm impedance. Well I disconnect the coax and connect it to the radio and it won’t tune. Hmmm – now it seems it’s the radio. I disconnect the coax, connect it to the analyzer and 20m is showing  a 3+ SWR and impedance of 15-20 ohms. What the heck? I wiggle the cable/coax but all looks tight and solid. I take some more readings and note them down and send off an email to the very helpful individual I got it from 6 months ago.

After dinner, I decide to take it down and throw up my basic 20m dipole I have and it is working fine. We’ll see how this all ends in the upcoming weeks.

For a very short time after dealing with the antenna this morning and it apparently working until I realized it wasn’t, I made a few contacts during the ARRL 10m contest. Only 21 contacts but before this contest, I only had 3 10m contacts logged. It’s interesting to see who I was able to hear/contact. The screen shot snippet below of the 21 contacts makes the “openings” pretty obvious.

I’m where the cross hairs are in NJ. That line of contacts across FL looks fake, but those pins are shown based on the grid location of the operator from QRZ. Here’s a close up of just FL.

Hopefully we can get my G5RV antenna straightened out soon.

73,
K2DSL