[NLRS] [BC'ers] Please educate me on N jumpers

[David Palm]

Thanks for all the replies I've gotten.  Very helpful ideas.

What remains stranger still to me is that individually the jumpers between
my FT-897 and the dummy load work fine, but when I had them as part of the
whole circuit there was infinite SWR.  More exploration is in order.....

But the good news is that the 902 MHz transverter is working and the
antenna is tuned up.  I have a sked with N0AKC on Sunday night to check it
out on the air, but I'm getting ~10 watts out and I'm listening to the 82nd
harmonic of an 11 MHz signal generator right now, so all seems to be
working.

More details to come on our roving.  I don't suppose anybody has an older
1296 transverter lying around they'd part with?  I'd love to have all four
of the lower bands for this trip........

Anyway, I'll ping the group in a few days to get ideas for rover stops in
the grids we're planning on visiting.

Thanks and 73,

David  W9HQ


On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:31 PM, Dr. Gerald N. Johnson
<geraldj at netins.net>wrote:

> Center pins a little short is one possible problem. Push a finger on the
> inner ground of the male plug hard enough to leave a ring. There should be
> a dent from the center pin as deep as the ring. E. g. the center pin should
> be nearly flush with the ground tube, at least long enough to dent your
> finger as it protrudes into the ground.
>
> Do an ohmmeter check mated to connectors, like those on the Bird. My
> suspicion is that you will find an open center conductor from a center pin
> too short. I prefer the UG-1185 connector to and of the UG-21 family
> because the center pin in the 1185 is captured by two beads and can't
> retract or be put together too short like the UG-21.
>
> At VHF and up, some right angle connectors are poor, I'll talk on that at
> CSVHF a little bit with an SMA corner adapter as an example. I can show
> what's bad, I don't yet have a perfect solution.
>
> Be sure to check for shorts, stray strands of shield can sneak into the
> wrong place in a connector and cause a short.
>
> 73, Jerry, K0CQ
>
>
> On 7/23/2013 9:09 PM, David Palm wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
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