HF Radio Problems

[Jammer]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

So you've got your feedline looped through those ferrites? Ferrites are cheap; that would be brilliant if that could work for me. Only problem is I'm not sure I have enough extra length

Yeah. It's at my house. I have 3/8" Heliax looped through the ferrites as shown. I think there are 18 of them and 25' of Heliax.


It's between the tuner and a 43' vertical antenna and a bunch of ground radials. There is a switchable loading coil on the antenna side of things for 160m (1.9 MHz). I have been unhappy with its performance overall. It's too close to my house and picks up a great deal of rx noise from every little dimmer and wall wart, and the tx performance is iffy because I don't have as many or as long of radials as I would like. It was an experiment and frankly the whole thing would have worked better on a sailboat where there is less electrical noise aloft and where the ocean provides an ideal ground plane.


It was part of an effort to experiment with technologies that could transfer to cruising.


I have since built some horizontal wire antennas for 160m and 80m that work much better. They are away from the house and supported by trees, and are close enough to resonance that they don't need extreme measures to keep the RF out of the shack.


I use a manual tuner, not an AT-130, but I was once a broadcast engineer and can tune an antenna manually while sleep deprived and after three Martinis.