On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of helping Colin KD8CCQ, a new ham, get set up. He had purchased an IC-706 and an SG-239 Smartuner, but was having some trouble figuring out how to hook it up. I didn’t see the manual, but according to this guy, it wasn’t much help anyway–at least not to the new ham.
Over the course of an hour or so, we discussed various antennas that he could set up, using the tuner, such as a long wire and a doublet (center-fed Zepp). He has a great setup in that he lives in an older neighborhood, and has two big trees more than 100 feet apart that he could use to support the doublet at 40 feet or more. He wasn’t sure that his wife was going to go for that, but I suggested that this really would be his best bet, and after a couple of months, she won’t even notice it.
It didn’t occur to me to search for information on the SG-239 on the Web. (Why I don’t know–there’s almost always a ton of info on just about any topic on the Web.) I did so this morning and found the SG-239 Antenna Coupler Tutorial.
What a great site! The site contains original material by Dave N9ZRT as well as links to other sites that describe applications of the SG-239. There are discussions of the various types of antennas to use with the tuner as well as how to build an inexpensive weatherproof case for the tuner.
Unfortunately, Colin does not yet have his General Class license, so he can’t do any transmitting, but he did set up the tuner and rig to do some listening. I got an enthusiast e-mail titled “Wow!” from him this morning, in which he exclaimed,
I wired things up upstairs last night while I was watching the game, threw a piece of wire onto the antenna tuner, switched the radio on 5 minutes ago and immediately picked up FM5BH who, as far as I can tell, is operating out of Martinique, South America! This is so cool!
Cool indeed–for him and for me.
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