[TVARC] K4QR’s Station Temporarily Off-the-Air Due to Buried Coax Failure

[Greg Weisheipl]

Tony;

It is hard to believe it is the coax especially coax that is protected within conduit! Could it be a connection. Sometimes my SWR will go up and I will go out and tighten the connection to the mast and it all goes back to normal. I would exhaust all other possibilities before I replaced the coax.

Greg
KA9WPG 

Sent from my iPhone in The Villages, Florida

> On Jun 3, 2023, at 6:35 PM, Anthony Wayne Hackenberg via TVARC <tvarc at mailman.qth.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi Members of TVARC’s MailList,
> 
> My (K4QR) amateur radio station is temporarily off-the-air (OTA) and will be for some time.  Recently, while working a Parks-on-the-Air (POTA) station, my SWR suddenly skyrocketed and then my output power plummeted to nothing.
> 
> After a couple of debugging sessions, I’ve determined the culprit. The underground coax line (buried in electrical grey conduit) has failed for some reason.  Since this coax run used high quality, “Davis”, direct-bury, coax, it’s still a wee bit of a mystery as to why it failed.
> 
> So, I’ll be off the airwaves until I can get a temporary workaround installed to bypass that culprit (failed coax run).  It will probably be a window feed-thru run of coax bypassing the problem.
> 
> Has anybody else experienced a failure with their buried (enclosed in conduit) coax runs to their (flagpole) antennas?  My failed coax run was only about eight (8) years old; but, maybe Florida’s environment is harder on coax.
> 
> 
> 73,
> 
> Tony
> Callsign: K4QR
> Sent from my iPad
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