Woodpeckers and more erections.

Mind out of the gutter thanks. This site is PG rated.

I came out this morning to find 40m dead on FT8. Just a single bar running through it. Thinking it was possibly some noise from the power supply, I adjusted it's noise knob with no luck. I turned it off, moved to battery and found the same thing. Then all of a sudden the waterfall is full of lines. 

Taking a listen, all I can hear from 7.02 to 7.150MHz is a woodpecker. Absolute write off. 80m is noisy (not surprising first thing in the morning), but some traffic moving through it. On 40, I can see traffic under the noise, but it looks.. messy. 

No idea what happened there. 

It is windy as hell outside, so perhaps that's causing it. I can just hear the same woodpecker on the dipole. No idea if something is let go somewhere in the house or if it's the wind, or just something nearby that's randomly started it. 

There is a clear pulse to it. 

If it doesn't seem to clear itself out in a few hours I might have to turn the power off and see what happens. The display on the G90 should soon make it clear if it's something from inside. 

In other news, the Diamond X200A arrived yesterday..

Excuse the messy floor.. 2 kids, 1 Staffy.. I can't keep up with the vacuuming. 

After work I set about pulling out the poll the old D150 was on and mounting it. A couple of hours later, and it was up. Unfortunately however, there is a run of RG213 that connects to the RG58 that had run down the poll. There used to be enough pull on that line that I could get it out under the roof tiles. This seems to no longer be the case, and the combination of a twist on PL259 with a poor solder connection and a little pull resulted in the plug coming out with the lead going to the antenna. 

Another hour or so of messing around, I managed to salvage another 4 inches.. not enough to get outside, but enough that I could lift a tile and get my hand in there... resoldered the plug, attached to the pull rod I put in then I was able to, with some degree of effort, get the damned cables connected, put the tiles back in place and get about my day. 

I have sore knees thanks to the outside ladder and its skinny rungs (the angle I had to have it on didn't help either..), and the rest of me hurts from climbing around the maze of a ceiling space, trying to navigate the labyrinth of ducts. 

The SWR isn't great.. it's heading towards 2:1 at the top end of 2m. I'm not sure I can do much about that. It's a fair chunk of cable between the radio and the antenna, patch leads at both ends, and a lightning arrestor, and a whole lot of connectors because of them. Then there's the RF sensing switch and the power meter. It's all likely to have some impact I guess.

Hopefully though I get some improvement in signal with it. I'll need to put some effort into playing around with VHF more and see how I go. If I find the time, I might even start trying to key repeaters that I haven't been able to hit before, just to see if I can. 

 

It looks kinda small up here, but as you can see from the earlier photo, this antenna barely clears the ceiling. It's also elevated on a 1.8m pole. I do have a 2.4m I could have used, but getting this up by myself is enough drama. Not awesome, but probably about as good as I'll get without rotating a yagi (don't tempt me). 

UPDATE: I turned off a fan running overnight in our bedroom, and it seems to have made some difference to the amount of interference I'm seeing on 40m. A quick flick of the main switch yielded no further results.  Either the noise is external, or it's something running on UPS. Hmm.