Ham Radio's Christmas home alone - a horror story

My wife was traveling overseas for a month around Christmas and the holiday season. She told me to enjoy myself, not to worry too much, and get plenty of rest.

I decided to spend the holidays taking on unfinished projects in ham radio. First was a search around the yard for a good location for a receive antenna for 160/80 m. The highest pine tree in my yard (90 ft) supports an inv L that finally made my signal competitive on transmit but not on receive. I noticed that pines in this tree were turning yellow and the tree was infested. Cutting the tree now would be inexpensive, but in a short time no tree cutter would want to climb it. I called various tree cutters. Nobody responded yet.

I bought a “super” SWR/power meter that is supposed to provide +- 2% reading from 1 to 2500 W. I was very excited until I noticed that on a high SWR (5:1) antenna this meter was showing SWR of 1.5, a 300% error. A few days (and nights) later, the culprit was found: a parameter set to 0.900 instead of 0.999.

I purchased a new automatic antenna tuner. It was light, fast, automatic and relatively quiet. It tuned wonderfully, until I tuned 6m with full power. A relay broke. This meant no portable operation during Christmas despite a 60+ degree weather. The tuner came back from repairs 10 days later.

Often there is S9+ power noise in my neighborhood. I decided to track it down with a 4-el 2m and 8 el 70cm quad, a quite heavy antenna. The antenna picked plenty of noises but nothing pointing to a single pole or a house. When finally I picked up a promising direction, I tripped on a curb, spraining my ankle and cutting a hand.

Yaesu Mark V Field has a reputation of strong clicks on CW with a bandwidth of 5 KHz. I did a W8JI click mod. It was difficult and scary; to get to the RF board, one needs to disconnect some 15 connectors and gently push aside bundles of 100+ wires. It also involved soldering among SMD devices. After the mods, testing revealed that a CW signal became 20 KHz wide. Two days (and nights) later, I changed the antenna in the receiver from a few feet of wire to an external antenna. Now the signal was only 2 KHz wide. Apparently the wire was picking noise directly radiating from various cables in the radio.

When running a KW on 80m I noticed on my new SWR meter that SWR was slowly creeping up from 1.2 to 1.4. Apparently the balun feeding my ladderline dipole was overheating. I put a heavier balun, and with the cover off the tuner, I checked for heating with a KW signal. There was no heating, but a rotor controller for my 2-el 5 band quad emitted a black cloud of smoke. There was a frantic search for the rotor schematic late at night. After 3 resistors were replaced, the rotor worked again but with a 70 degree shift. The adjustment to eliminate the shift was stuck, but got unstuck 2 days later.

I have never been so tired after Christmas and the holiday season. And definitely my wife was not the problem.