As I promised earlier, I’m currently QRV from Herøy, Norway. Locator JP66ca, IOTA EU-062.

As a personal challenge, I didn’t bring any antennas with me this time. Instead, I brought some wire, a couple of nice toroids, a 4:1 balun, and a five meter long telescopic fibreglass pole. “No problem”, I foolishly thought to myself.

It started out nice with the first antenna I built, which was a 40-10m Carolina Windom clone. Measuring just 20 meters, it was even suitable for the small garden outside. It was strung from the top of the house, sloping down into the back garden, since we do not have any trees at all around. It worked nice on 40-10m, even 6m worked great, and I could’ve settled with this, had it not been for a few seagulls crashing mid-air into the wire (!), and there are thousands of seagulls here, if not more. I decided to try another approach instead.

So for the next attempt I went for a 15m monobander. Since I need a handful more countries for DXCC on 15m, I went for the telescopic fibreglass pole with elevated radials. The build process was straight-forward, and it didn’t take more than an hour before I could whip up the NanoVNA and measure it. The readings were almost perfect, SWR=1.1 and a Smith chart that could go in circles for days.

This is were things started behaving strange. When I started transmitting the radio reported a perfect SWR, but after a few seconds of PTT the SWR would gradually start climbing with no sign of giving up. At first I thought the coaxial cable was bad (maybe water damaged, we had some heavy rain), but a new and dry cable did not change the behaviour. I also tried adding a choke, using a HF LP filter, tuner, but the SWR would keep on climbing. I have seen similar issues earlier where a balun would heat up, but in this case there is no balun; the coaxial cable goes into a dipole adapter which basically just “splits” the centre and shield in two directions. This is the only element I haven’t changed, and we did use it earlier on Market Reef – maybe we ran too much power though it earlier, basically boiling it. I will try to replace it by soldering the wires directly to a SO239 chassi mount connector later.

I also accidentally noticed that the RSGB IOTA Contest is in a few days, and since I’m on IOTA EU-062 I might jump in considering there probably aren’t many active operators from this entity. I will definitely work CW, and if the conds are good I’ll be on SSB as well. I still have a few days to find the “perfect antenna” for contesting, but if my vertical attempts continue to fail I still have the Windom as a backup.