WQ6X Wrangles a complete antenna System Workover

The weekend before, the behind-the-scenes wiring at the WQ6X portable setup @ W7AYT's
QTH in Concord was redone, freeing up several wall warts by parallelling several power cable runs.  As well-done as all that was, one audio ground loop still remains.  Fortunately, the array of audio filters in-line can be twiddled to all but eliminate the annoying 440-hz HuM.

For this last weekend, the project was to resurrect the antenna mast system which blew down during the early February windstorm which swept thru Contra Costa County during the rainstorm deluge.  The nearby maple tree literally "grew into" on the the guy ropes, eventually snapping it, creating a chain reaction, stressing the mast mid-level until it buckled over.  Fortunately, the Cobra dipole wires softened the inevitable gravity-induced tumble in the flower bushes, putting a slight bend in the Yagi reflector element - easily remedied.

Largely for safety reasons, the replacement telescoping
mast was moved 15 feet away from its original position. 
Using an MFJ-259b antenna analyzer, the 10-meter Long John yagi elements we properly readjusted resulting in a relatively low SWR between 28.020 thru 28.520 - the FT-2000 into an MFJ-993 auto tuner tweaked it to an SWR of about 1.2:1.  

Operations above 28.555 rarely occur, making this an effective 30' high yagi installation - perfect for effective 10-meter operation.  Being somewhere near the peak of solar cycle 25, this simple yagi installation should be quite effective.  The REAL TesT will be next weekend's All Asian (A-A) DX Contest.

A pully system attached below the rotor unit makes it relatively easy to hoist the 8JK Cobra sloper array with one wire configured in inverted-L fashion.  The 450-ohm ladder line was replaced with
a matching balun terminating into a long run of RG-213 coax into the shack, all but eliminating stray RFI in the ham shack itself.

Once the antennas were functional and decent SWR confirmed from 80m to 6m, the game was
to call CQ DX band-by-band to collect Reverse Beacon Network (RBN) stats while rotating the yagi
in 45-degree azimuth increments, making a handful of calls to get the RBN's attention, repeating the process, ending at 360+ azimuth degrees.  Dropping to the next lowest band, the process was repeated, sweeping the yagi in the reverse direction.

Previous experimentation has demonstrated the 10-meter Long John Yagi can be successfully
tuned on 12, 15, 17, 20 & 30-meters; the verdict is still out on frequencies below 10-mhz. On
bands other than 10m, the antenna is probably function as a rotating dipole - similar to the
well-known BuddiPole.  Also on those bands, looking at RBN spots is suggesting that the
antenna is actually radiating as an END-FIRE Array (i.e. off the end of the elements - NoT
broadside perpendicular).  Calling CQ with the antenna pointed to New England, RBN posts
spots from W4-NC and TI7W (Costa Rica).  I look forward to researching further.  Does anyone
know how to antenna-model a 3-element 10-meter yagi run on the lower amateur bands? 
It also tuned on 6-meters altho RBN could NoT hear me.

Now that the Yagi and the 8JK array is more-or-less back-in-action, I will be looking for opportunities to test the configuration.  75-meters Sunday evening produced disappointing 8JK results due to horrible geo-magnetic noise.  In the spirit of "When in Doubt CHEAT (BuT withing the Rules) ",
I remoted-in to the Sunday evening nets running WQ6X "Remote from Ramona".

While there is major tweaking ahead for this current antenna configuration,

this is TRULY the spirit of amateur radio - EXPERIMENTATION.

What Experimentation do YOU play around with?

What was YOUR last antenna creation?