OZ9AEC

Now that my HF2V was tuned rather well, it was time to test it on the air.

I started out on 30 meters where I worked SVØXAO right away. He gave me 589 and I gave him 599. Despite the good reports there was a lots of QRN on the band. This didn't stop me and the HF2V to work VO1TK who was using an IC-735 and a dipole. Not bad.

Later on I worked many more contacts, including TU2 and VP5 on 40, and OY3 and CN2 on 80. The HF2V is doing very well!

Tuning the 80 meter coil of the HF2V messed up my settings on 40 and 30 meters in a way that I ended up with barely acceptable SWR on all 3 bands. I definitely needed a new tuning strategy.

Now it's time to adjust the 80 meter coil. The current setting for all three bands are given below

With the current settings on 30m (26cm 2.5 turns shorted), f_c on 40 shifted to 7.188 MHz - even with 8 turns shorted. Moving the shorting strap to 7 turns, f_c shifts to 6.988 MHz. With 7.5 turns shorted f_c = 7.039 MHz.

I have tried to adjust the 30m coil on the HF2V in order to bring the resonance closer to 10.1 MHz. Increasing the length of the coild 17->20 cm did indeed move the cenntre frequency to 9.2 MHz, but going up to 25 cm did not seem to make a big difference; it only moved f_c by about 250 kHz.