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Saturday, February 20, 2010

Oh well ......

40 Meters was not nearly as fruitful tonight as the higher bands were during the daylight hours. I was hearing mostly Europeans and very loud stateside stations. I worked a few Germans and Poles and that was about it. Nothing too exotic on 40 Meters tonight. I pulled the plug early and will get up early tomorrow morning to see if I can possibly hear any VK or ZL stations in the morning. That would be cool to work Oceania again from NJ on 5 Watts!

I did have another Homer Simpson "Doh" moment, however. I currently have three antennas. The G5RV, the Butternut HF9V (which got a workout today!) and my Inverted "L". Of all, the Inverted "L" gets the littlest use and I will probably take it down this Spring. For whatever reason, it is VERY noisy. Way noisier than the G5RV and even noisier than the HF9V - I'm used to the vertical being noisy. So I would say it's a safe bet to say that the "L" get used 2% of the time, or less.

So that leaves the vertical and the HF9V as my two primary antennas. I have all three connected to a coax switch so I can choose between them. Suddenly it occurred to me ...... I have the built in antenna tuner in the K2 with TWO antenna inputs! I removed the G5RV and the Butternut from the coax switch and plugged them directly into the K2. No switch loss and when I switch between the two antennas, the K2's tuner memory kicks in and I'm set and ready to go.

I wonder why I hadn't thought of this before! It's so obvious! Sometimes I feel so stupid!

72 de Larry W2LJ

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