As you might have seen I have a little bit of antenna work planned for the end of the week. Actions are as follows:
(1) Replace to cheep and nasty coax on the HF long wire with high quality Messi & Paoloni RG-58 Mil Spec coax along with Messi & Paoloni fancy reusable PL-259 plugs. At the same time I want to run the coax from the antenna to the shack window in a better way. The cable management is not going to make any difference to performance but I like good cable management and it reduces the risk of the groundsmen cutting through my coax then they cut the trees and bushes back at the end of summer.
(2) Perform a general inspection of the 9:1 unun and it’s connectors to make sure everything is as it should be. I know there has been some exceptional solar weather conditions in recent weeks but I’m just concerned my antenna is not preforming at it’s best.
(3) The last upgrade to the HF long wire saw the weight of the antenna wire getting moved from being directly on the unun connector to the mast just below the unun which is much stronger. From what my father told me he secured the antenna wire directly to the mast and he didn’t use an insulator so this might not be a good thing. I’ve made a very short insulator that needs dropping into place.
(4) Get the light stand that I’m using as a mast up at least one more stage and ideally up to it’s maximum of 4 meters. This should put a bit of a slope on the wire and just maybe open signal propagation up to the south which at the moment is almost entirely closed to me. If this works it would be nice to get a QSL into South Africa.
(5) The mast/stand that my Diamond D-130 discone is mounted on is a little unstable and will blow over in a bit of wind. To stop this I drop a steel car wheel over the mast and seat it onto the base legs/feet. This really stabilises the mast/stand in winds. Once this is done I can extend the mast to it’s full 3 meters. It’s only a small increase in hight but 3 meters is better than 2 meters.
(6) In the shack I’m going to fit a 2 way coax switch so that I can divert/split signals from the D-130 discone between my SDRPlay SDR radio and an extension coax that runs into my living room so I can sit listening to my Icom R-15 scanner without having to be stuck in the shack.
(Optional 7 if time allows) At the moment I have a Nagoya 2m/70cm antenna sitting on the floor which I used for general VHF/UHF reception before I got the D-130 up. I’m going to take the opportunity to get the SWR dialled in and just mount it at the base of the mast of the D-130 on the steel car wheel for occasional use with the Icom IC-705 or my Yaesu FT-5 or Icom ID52e HT radios.