Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018 — Another night of El Stinko propagation on 80 CW, so what else is new? I wrote several entries back about the alleged return of decent propagation … well, that night or two of winter-like band conditions was simply the evil sense of humor of the Propagation Gods, who decided to taunt a particular QSO-starved brass pounder whose callsign ends in Zed!
Since I wrote that entry, the band conditions on 75 and 80 have been in the crapper. Tonight, I could only catch every second or third character the NCS was transmitting.
I did a little more rehab work on an MFJ-989 roller inductor antenna tuner I picked up cheap on eBay a few months ago. The roller inductor in this unit has a plastic core, it isn’t one of those hollow core rollers used on newer tuners. At some point, the coil must have gotten really hot — probably too much power with a crappy match — and some of the plastic melted and slumped. The gob of plastic blocked the roller’s ability to turn, which is why it ended up as “parts only” on eBay. I used a dremel to remove the melted plastic that blocked the roller’s ability to turn.
From that point, the roller turned and the thing was fully functional. While testing it, I found some of “hiccups” in the roller’s continuity. It felt like and turned out to be just dirt and gunk on the coil. So this evening, I took the cover off and cleaned the coils and the roller. I then removed my Heathkit SA-2060 and put the MFJ 989 in place. I hooked up my MFJ antenna analyzer and used its oscillator to set some signals I could use to find the appropriate tuner settings rather than use the transmitter. I don’t know why I was so careful about transmitting signals on the band, I don’t think propagation would have allowed my sigs to go anywhere!
My next radio project is to hang my all-band dipole outside the window of Studio B in our library/family room. A large fork of the maple tree next to the house 
was blasted out by a lightning bolt earlier this summer, and I need to shoot a line over the tree and hang my dipole again. I sure miss being able to use my FTDX-3000 here in my corner.
I also picked up a new vinyl face plate for a Heathkit SA-2040 I picked up cheap on eBay. The exterior of the tuner looks rough, and the new faceplate will help address that. As bulletproof as the Heathkit SA-2040 and 2060 tuners are, I’m not inclined to put this one up for sale.
I bought one of the inexpensive HF SWR bridges to use outboard with the 300-watt roller tuner I’ve use in Studio B, the MFJ 969. The tuner actually works fine, but after the lightning strike that took out the tree limb, I found that the tuner’s metering won’t display forward power, only reflected power. This really isn’t a bad problem, since you watch the reflected power to get the tuner adjusted, and I can confirm the match by checking the SWR reading on the rig. The little MFJ-822 fit the bill as a small SWR bridge, and its meter has a back light to boot. Just like anything, you get what you pay for, but I purposely wanted this one because it was small and cheap. SWR is relative anyway, hi hi.
SPEAKING OF ANTENNAS. The first antenna I installed here in Studio B was a longwire that run 150 feet from the house to the far end of the barn. I couldn’t get it high enough over the metal roof of the barn to suit me, so I didn’t consider it much of an antenna. I may reinstall it, but this time, direct it to the east of barn, to the rear corner of our farm. I would like to have a 200-foot longwire to play with.
73 es CUL de KY4Z SK SK …. dit dit ….