I tidied up my shack.
Over the years I've added many antennas to my station. Some stay, some
go, but the cables seem to still come into the shack. I had everything
from b...@ssed Heliax down to RG-58, plus rotor cables and CAT5 and
quite a few that I couldn't remember what they were ever connected to.
Needless to say, the back end of my shack was a complete rats-nest.
I needed to replace my CAT5 due to recent storm damage, and I decided
this would be a good excuse to get things sorted out.
So, anything not needed was removed. Others were routed neatly, and even
ty-wrapped in some cases. Even the lab side of the shack was cleaned up,
with shorter GPIB cables where appropriate.
Now, I have a problem on 20m.Before, all was fine. This is with my F3K,
which goes through a Daiwa SWR meter to my AT-1000, then to the antenna
switch. My 20m antenna is a Cushcraft A4S at ~ 50ft. It is better than
2:1 over the band. When I hit the PTT, there is no output, of
course.When I speak, it goes to ~100w as expected, but when I pause it
still shows ~10w fwd with about a 3:1 SWR. I disconnected the mic and
the key, and used CWX to send a carrier, and it does the same thing.
Next, tried it into a good dummy load, and had no problems. So it looks
like an RFI issue, but why would the SWR change? Probably radiating
somewhere it wasn't supposed to, but I coupled it to my spectrum
analyzer and didn't see anything untoward. Still scratching my head on
that one.
PCs and radios are all connected to a substantial ground system.
The only thing left was the Firewire cable. I only had some RG-8 size
ferrets, so had to run the firewire cable looped through them. I really
couldn't see any improvement.
Based on comments seen here, I'm going to get a couple of Granite
Digital cables, but a scan of their website
(http://www.granitedigital.com/firewireproducts.aspx) is rather
confusing. Which one is right for this application? I have about 6ft
between the back of the F3K and its computer.
Sorry for the rant. It is not intended to be a criticism of Flex in any
way, just a notice to anyone that a messy shack can be quite a good thing.
There used to be a saying: 'Don't fix it if it ain't broke'.
The ham version seems to be: 'Fix it until it is broke'.
GL & 73, Alf NU8I
Scottsdale AZ DM43an
160m > 24Gigs
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