Despite the higher SWR I mentioned in the previous entry, I’ve been operating with my ground plane antenna. The SWR measured with my antenna analyzer was somewhere in between 1.5:1 and 1.6:1, which is still relatively low. Certainly, I didn’t think I’d harm the rig.
After dinner today, I went down to the shack, and noticed that the SWR had crept up a little bit more. Now the analyzer showed an SWR of about 2.0:1 near 14050 kHz. I decided it was time to do something about this.
I got out the ice chipper and went out into the yard. It took me about 45 minutes to chop out the eight feet of coax that was under ice, but I got it out.
And what do you know? Now, my SWR is back to near 1.1:1. How do you like that?
Leave a Reply