I don't know what I did but it now works. In a previous post I sort of bragged about a 5 element Yagi beam that I built/designed for 146 MHz. I got the antenna to work. Then the radio died. My trusty Yaesu FT-480R that had served me faithfully for best part of 15 years appeared to have dropped dead and was no destined to live in Yaesu heaven. Now this did happen once before, many moons ago and I got it to work. I don't know how. It just did.
Well in a repeat performance it all happened again and that which appeared dead, isn't. It works well now. What did I do? I have no idea. You see this hobby is 90% luck, 1% knowledge, and 100% bragging. He who brags the most and the loudest, wins.
In another bit of good news, a friend was operating one of the repeaters here in Melbourne and asked me to give him a sound check on his speakers. I was to talk (I am good at that) and he was to listen. I used high power and low power. On low power he was able to tell me that I was making the repeater but not real well. Now if I have been operating on a whip antenna I would have made the repeater with ease. The reason my signal was poor was coz I had my antenna pointing away from the repeater. Good news indeed. Saved me many hours of leg work and waiting for others to tell me what I hoped would happen.
That brings me to another little subject. I do a thing called Triple M's. One of the questions we have to answer is: How did you honour God with your money this week and did you covet something that didn't belong to you. Well, I did covet something, sort of. My little Icom IC-T90A has an antenna problem which I can't fix. The radio is sort of useless anyway and I was going to trash it. Whilst looking on eBay I found another radio I rather liked and (coveted) put in a bid on the rig. I was out bidden and have now repented of that and will look at some Ham Radio swap meets a little later.
Enough for now.
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