[NLRS] Please educate me on N jumpers

[David Palm]

It turns out this had nothing to do with jumpers.  I was back at getting
the rover rigs ready this weekend and back to infinite SWR in almost every
configuration.  Finally I said to myself "this has to be the Bird meter"
and sure enough, when I looked into the output connector the center was all
splayed out (!)  Don't know how it got like that, but once I pulled it all
back together with a needlenose pliers everything worked fine again.

We should be ready to go with 100+ watts on 222, 100+ watts on 432 and 10
watts on 902.  See our roving schedule on W0UC's spreadsheet.  Hope to
catch you all in the contest!

73,

David  W9HQ



On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 9:09 PM, David Palm <thepalmhq at gmail.com> 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
>
>
>
>


-- 

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its
victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber
barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty
may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those
who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so
with the approval of their own conscience" (C. S. Lewis, *God in the Dock*).