[NLRS] Please educate me on N jumpers

[David Palm]

Ok so I had a little misadventure this evening that seems to have turned
out okay, but has me puzzled.

I bought a 902 transverter just to get us through this upcoming contest.  I
would prefer to deploy my W1GHZ transverter, but I'm too slow to get it
working.  That's neither here nor there.

I fired up the boughten transverter and tried to measure its power output.
I got only a little under 3 of the advertised 10 watts and the reflected
power was just over 2 watts.  This was into a dummy load good to 2 GHz and
a Bird 43 meter with 5E element to measure power.

Cutting to the chase, I eventually used my FT-897 and a different Bird
element to narrow the problem down to jumpers.  I finally found a
combination of two jumpers (one from rig to meter and one from meter to
dummy load) that let me determine that the transverter was putting out
close to its advertised 10 watts and then I was able to tune my WA5VJB
"cheap yagi" for a perfect match.

The consternation that I feel is that I have now a number of
commercially-made N to N jumpers that I purchased from a guy on QTH.com,
that I thought should be perfectly fine, that give me basically infinite
SWR when connected in this test set-up.  Ohmed out with a DC multimeter
they check out fine.  Can anyone give me some idea of what might be going
wrong here and whether I should just throw these in the trash, or whether
there could be something else going on here?  Any feedback would be
appreciated.  This was a frustrating evening, although in the end I have
what I want, a working transverter and a tuned antenna.

Thanks and 73,

David  W9HQ