Foundations of Amateur Radio

Over the weekend a friend of mine convinced me to help plant some trees. Mind you, I was told that this was going to be a blue tree painting day. The Blue Tree Project is now a global awareness campaign that paints dead trees blue to spread the message that "it's OK to not be OK", and help break down the stigma that's still largely attached to mental health.

In the process, I learnt that my physical stamina is not what it once was and my current appetite for bending over and shovelling dirt is, let's call it, muted.

After the digging and the sausage sizzle under the branches of an actual blue tree, there was some opportunity for playing radio, something I haven't done in much too long. I wasn't sure when I last got into the fresh air to actually listen, but I must confess, the coax cable that I picked up out of my shed had been hanging there for several years.

The location where we planned to play was in a rural setting, right next to a dam, which surprisingly actually had water in it. The idea was to set-up a vertical antenna with a couple of ground radials, plug in a radio and have a listen. I have to say, after the digging I was really looking forward to this.

My piece of coax, about 20 meters long, was used to connect the antenna to the radio so we could sit in the shade whilst the antenna stood out in the sun near the dam.

The antenna, a telescopic one, came with a ground spike and about eight radials and needed to be tuned to some extent, as-in, near-enough is close enough, since we had an antenna tuner with our radio. To achieve the tuning we wanted to connect a NanoVNA to the coax which was the first challenge. The BNC connectors on my coax were pretty dull, likely a combination of poor quality, accumulated dust, humidity and lack of use.

As an added bonus the centre pin on one end seemed a little bent.

After working out how to get an SMA adaptor into the connectors we were in business. Connected up between the antenna and the NanoVNA we set out to get things lined up. The SWR on the display, hard to read in the full sun at the best of times, seemed to be a little odd. Not something I could put my finger on, but if you've seen enough SWR plots you know what it's supposed to look like and for some reason it didn't.

We bravely carried on, connected the radio to the coax and started tuning around. Didn't seem to be a lot of activity on the 20m band. We couldn't hear the local NCDXF beacon which was odd. Also no FT8 activity, also odd.

If anything, it seemed like there was nothing happening at all.

Before we continue, I'll point out that this can happen with a big enough burp from the Sun. I hadn't seen any alerts, so I wasn't buying it. We removed my coax, plugged in something much shorter and the bands came alive with all the activity we'd been expecting.

And then it started to rain.

Seriously. Finally got out into the world, got radio activity going, had actual signals to tune to and it starts raining. Glynn VK6PAW and I took one look at each other, shook our heads and dashed for the radio to bring it under shelter. I put on my raincoat, and together we disassembled the antenna and the station and went home.

Clearly, my coax was faulty. Lesson learnt. Test your coax before you go out and you'll have a better outcome.

About that.

Today, a week later, I'm sitting on the floor of my shack with the offending coax between my legs, surrounded by adaptors, a NanoVNA, a RigExpert, a dummy load, a short and an open terminator. No matter how I test, no matter what I test, everything is as it should be. I can tell you that the Time Domain Reflectometry shows me that the coax is 25.8m long, useful information, but not really any surprise.

There's also no significant return loss, unless you head for 1 GHz, but even then it's perfectly respectable, if anything, better than I expected.

There are no loose connections, nothing rattling, nothing amiss.

The only thing that I can even begin to think might be the case is that one of the centre pins on one end of the coax is slightly shorter. Combined with "close enough is good enough" when I attached the SMA adaptor in the field, might account for a connection that never got made, since the adaptor wasn't seated deep enough.

So, I'm not quite ready to cut off the connectors and re-terminate this coax. I'll be taking it into the field again, but I'll make sure that I bring an alternative, just in case. I'm also leaving the SMA adaptors connected to the coax. Future me will thank me.

Oh, yes, in-case you're wondering, I'm slowly working out how to improve my stamina. That was not fun. If you want to know more about Blue Trees and its message, check out the BlueTreeProject.com.au website and if you ever just want to talk, get in touch.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB