SWR check

With the radio all set up now in the new shack and connected to the antenna with a slightly shorter length of coax than before, and after being up in the air for two years now, I figured it was a good time to check the SWR performance across the bands to see how/if it changed.

SWR measurements across the bands
SWR measurements across the bands

Compared with two years ago, there haven’t been too many changes. SWR has gone up a little bit in general for all the bands, but not a whole lot. The biggest change seems to have happened on 80m, with the SWR around 3.8 MHz dipping down to a range that I think the radio’s tuner might be able to handle. The SWR on 15m has also gone above the range the radio’s tuner will handle, so that’s one band I seem to have lost.

Things still seem to be looking pretty good for the antenna so far. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a few more up this year.

Antenna SWR curves

Spent some time yesterday using the MFJ-259B to collect SWR values for the antenna in the different ham bands from 160m to 6m (I skipped 60m). The end result looked like this (vertical scale on all the graphs is from 0 to 10 SWR).

Antenna SWR curves
Antenna SWR curves

So I have an antenna that’s pretty good on 6 bands: 40m, 20m, 17m, 12m, 10m and 6m. Interestingly, even with the high SWR on 15m, the radio will tune the antenna there too. Not bad for a dipole that’s straight on one side and kind of L-shaped on the other one (darn tree branches)