[Lowfer] Brass monkeys heat - Opera 32 and Aurora

[Howell, Laurence J]

John - Warren - et al

Im going to take part the "warming" connection apart and  see what gives - need to do this is daylight as the ol' oil lamp is a little dim in the woods and the bears still haven't gone nite-nite yet. That lubricant you mentioned is the same we use on Exchange power bar connections - amazing stuff. Not cheap.

If I cant find the  component that is causing issue (which Im sure I will as the other termination point doesn't heat up) then Im going to bulkhead the antennae cable thru the rubber made box and then silver solder onto the tuning components directly bypassing the ceramic stand offs, two bolt and two lug connections -  Im sure my total heat component loss is a few Watts but Resistance (is futile* HHGTTG) is a killer in these loops both for stability in tuning but it would only get worse over time. I did check with a Uv/arc detector to make sure I didn't have any other sharp points but all appear benign.  The loop is held away from the trees and on large ribbed insulators as these here Spruce are a little more spiky and not Smoother branched Cottonwoods and Im sure Id lose the insulation pretty quickly. The forest is very dry and I don't want to start a large bonfire before the 5th Nov (for our UK friends)

Ill start on Opera 32 tonight from around 0200Z thru till 10Z when SAQ  starts up - that's if my dying Samsung laptop doesn't go offline.


As an aside during the transmission last night and after that X ray flare we did have a strong Blue/Green Auroral Arc to some 15deg above the horizon here. So, that wouldn't have helped propagation, at all, at LF.

 Im also getting some 25Hz of spread of carriers coming over from G land on 10MHz QRSS - again telling me a lot of stuff is going to and fro above my head.



Laurence, WE2 XP Q  KL 1 X  Sunny Alaska

Was thinking about the brass bolted connections this morning. I'm no
mechanical engineer, so this is just head-scratching...

Silver-plating the hardware might be interesting, but the plating
probably wouldn't hold up well on bolts and nuts. RCA used to use copper
and copper-plated hardware in their AM rigs. Probably high-copper brass
or straight copper would be hard to find in those categories now.

I wonder how much good metal-to-metal contact you really get in a
bolt/nut connection. Maybe something like Conducto-Lube
silver-impregnated grease applied to clean threads would fill in the
spaces and create more contact area.

John, W1TAG