Hi James, Thanks so much for the extremely informative reply! I will dig deep into a lot of your suggestions later tonight. I think I may have overcomplicated the issue, so let me see if I can give it a shakedown.
First off, lets forget everything besides 40m. That's really the band I am concerned with first and foremost. Before Elecraft came into my life, I was using a Yaesu FT840 with an MFJ941E tuner. Coax (10' or so) out of the tuner, through the floor, into a barrel that goes through cementboard to the outside. From there, short coax up to a W2DU 4:1 current balun. Then 16' or so of windowline, and the dipole up about 20', about 67' long. I have a very restricted yard for antennas and just wanted to get on the air. Anyway, after some poking and prodding I was able to consistently tune up on 40m fairly well, 1.5 or less. I made several CW contacts across the country as well as Canada and South America. Then I built the KX1 with the autotuner, and was not able to get under 5:1 from the same point with all the same components in place. No big deal, I didn't intend on using the KX1 in the 'shack' anyway. But then I built the K2/KAT2, and was getting pretty much the same result. As it stands right now, I cannot break below 9.9:1 on the KAT2 on 40m from the shack. I've tried different coax types and lengths on each side of the barrel and have seen no improvement. Also, it doesn't matter which balun I use, or whether I select 1:1 or 4:1 on the BL2. Results are the same. Now, when I attach the K2 directly to the balun (now an Elecraft BL2) I can get a great match on 40m. As I can add a very short piece between the K2 and the balun with no ill effect, but once the coax is longer than about 5', the SWR shoots up. I picked up an analyzer today (259B). It's my first one, and I hardly know what I'm doing, but I can tell you right off the bat that whether I attach it to the coax in the shack, or directly to the balun, it's appearing to be resonant at the same 3 places. Around 10mhz, 20mhz, and 26mhz. If there is any other information you would like to know from the analyzer at any specific frequency and connnection point, please let me know. I hope this helps... I sincerely appreciate everyone's assistance. I'm still learning and it's nice to have a place to get good info and not made to feel like I'm an idiot. :drunk::confused: -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/High-SWR-on-20-and-40-tp4403006p4406096.html Sent from the [OT] mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
