Hey all,
Nearly one year ago I installed two cross-yagis on a Hummel Teletower with a YAESU G5400B rotator system. I have made a lot of thoughts on how to "wind" the coaxial feed lines around both: the azimuth and also the elevation axis. With elevation I am very fine, but maybe this is just a matter of time as it seems to be with azimuth!
Some days ago I found some flipping faint/strong signals on my SatNOGS station (https://network.satnogs.org/stations/37/) in the 2m band. First I thought this could be some kind of frontend-overloading with the RF amplifier, but it turned out: this is not!
Today I ran some tests while driving the antenna with my YAESU FT-847 at minimum output power (around 1.5W). I could see that with elevation rotation everything is fine from 0° to 180° el. Then I tried to turn the azimuth and - guess what? - SWR "jumps" at around 270° from 1.1 to >4! That truely indicates a broken cable.
As I installed that wires, I made a short connection of flexible coax cable (HIGHFLEXX 7) from the phasing line box, down the mast and made a connection to ECOFLEX 15 running into the shack. The flexible lines are "wrapped" around the azimuth pipe with a radius of around 30cm. I am not sure, but it could be broken just on top of the N-connector... Do I need to somehow support that short piece of wrapped line?
Any hints on how to mount the cables to prevent this are really appreciated!
Kind regards,
Patrick, DL4PD