The old roman filosopher Seneca - who knew nothing about antennas I suppose - spoke out these wise words.
Words that give me some hope after a very disappointing day : CQWW preparation day.
Nothing much to prepare : you just buy a remote tuner, hang a wire on it and it works.
Let's see how to make an antenna for 80 and 160m in a few minutes. Take 30m of wire (just in the middle between the two wavelenghts), cut some radials and hang it up. Terminate with the MFJ998RT and you can start the contest.
Maybe a quick test before starting to be sure ? No problem on 40m (no need, but nice to see it works), no problem on 160m, and on 80m... no tune. Aaargh !!! Why is this system not tuning on 80m ?!. OK, wrong wire length: let's cut of 5m. Tune on 40m, no more tune on 160m, no tune on 80m.
This is not fun a few hours before the biggest contest of the year. Call the antenna help-desk (same number as Franki, ON5ZO). Sure, he has suffered the same problems. It doesn't work with 30m of wire. Radials must be cut on the exact length, etc, etc...
Finally at 15h00 local time I finished (in the rain of course) a simple 80m full size vertical with radials on the ground. A very poor solution on 80m and no antenna on 160m.
Direct consequence on the number of multipliers. So I just fight for the number of QSO's :-)
But remembering Seneca, It will be better next month !
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