Alan - its certainly made a mess up here already with very variable HF conditions and Im hearing not a lot above 10MHz at the moment save a warbly LA/SM which is nearly always a sign of motion up there. Shame its not stopped raining in Noah proportions as I cant see the Aurora to offset the lousy LF/MF radio conditions.

Its a certainly law that says you get everything on the nose and wham a large K interger appears overhead. Time will heal :-)


I think Im virtually ready to go on QRO Tx again and sorted out the drive to the 5501 after reading Mike, Jim and Daves work on modding. I had to reread the articles as its been a few years. My issue is Im now driving the input splitter directly as sine wave from my exciters (I do have sq wave +12V pk to pk sources too but want to use what I have without adding another squarer) but shorting out one of the isolating bridge resistors has done the trick and I can drive from the HP GPS derived source now with a few dBs to spare without the additional squarer.

Ive been running the PA at around 1Kw into the loop tuner on OP32 overnight and all appears coolish save for my ceramic feedthru 1/4 inch diameter brass bolts which get warm with about 50A of RF or more running thru them :-)  I did have to sacrifice a few Birch trees to get a clearish run.

So I think Im ready for some coherent transmissions - now we just need to reduce the losses by 40dB or more over the pole :-)  I think Ill wait a few days for hopefully a small recovery as the electric power meter certainly whizzes around on transmit, but again from memory the path to VK and ZL repairs pretty quickly from here.

Laurence KL1 X Wasilla AK
WE2XPQ Part 5