I may have found the cause of the distortion, and another bit of helpful info:
I got a copy of the audio of the pass from someone else and I'm comparing it to mine. When I am transmitting there are at least three places where I can hear other transmissions, clearly different FM transmissions of other people talking. At one point I even hear a roger beep like sound followed by another voice. That could just be a symptom of whatever is causing the desense though.
Regarding this:
On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 2:12 PM, James Duffey jamesduffey@comcast.net wrote:
If I had to guess, I would say that you have a feed line problem, either a short or open.
Another option may be a poor connection or a short in the diplexer. - Duffey KK6MC
I have suspected the duplexer myself. There is only one connection from it to the radio. No adapters. The feedline from the duplexer has an SMA connector and screws right onto the SMA on the Kenwood TH-D72a. Still it could be the BNC connectors that go to the antenna.
I asked the owner of Arrow antenna about the possibility of this issue being caused by the duplexer and he was not aware of that ever happening before.
:-/
On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 2:12 PM, James Duffey jamesduffey@comcast.net wrote:
If I had to guess, I would say that you have a feed line problem, either a short or open.
Another option may be a poor connection or a short in the diplexer. - Duffey KK6MC
On Aug 19, 2016, at 11:48 AM, John Brier johnbrier@gmail.com wrote:
For the third time I've lost the ability to hear myself on the downlink of SO-50 using this setup. This was on today's 1521 UTC SO-50 pass.
In the past I had what appeared to be very similar behavior with a different arrow antenna, no duplexer and two radios. I troubleshot that issue to the screw in the gamma match coming lose which caused high SWR.
In this case I tested the SWR with my MFJ-259B SWR analyzer and it was 1.1:1 and X=45-55 across almost the entire band.
I actually was able to hear myself in the beginning of the pass and then it got worse until the point where I could not hear myself for the rest of the pass.
Actually, in this case, unlike the other two times where I wasn't able to hear myself on the downlink I had another unusual behavior which was I *WAS* able to hear myself but it was extremely loud and distorted. This happened maybe twice in the middle of the pass and then after that I just couldn't hear myself when I transmitted.
When I was able to hear myself very loud and distorted I felt it wasn't how I was getting into the bird, but somehow my radio was demodulating my 2 meter transmission. I confirmed with W4FS who was also on this pass that my audio never sounded odd.
Very annoying and my only guess as to what could be causing this is some sort of external interference occasionally getting into my radio.
Any ideas?
73, John Brier KG4AKV _______________________________________________ Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the official views of AMSAT-NA. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: http://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb