So, I have had to travel all the way to Bishop Auckland today in order to obtain a parasol base for temporary mounting of my fibreglass mast (which may fit in the base but may not which is why I bought an extra mast), the base in question is made of 25kg of cement, and is supplied with 4 castor type wheels fitted with brakes, and assembling this thing was a case of screw in the centre and fit the castors to slide in mounts on the underside.
Other accessories I needed was two crimp-on BNC plugs which I have already fitted to a piece of coax thin enough to get through the window in case it gets a bit nippy outside and I want to shut the window, a 10-metre RG58 lead already fitted with PL259 plugs and supplied with SO239 to BNC, SO239 to SMA and SO239 to N-type though I cannot see why I'd need an N-type connector right now, I obtained these all from Maplin Electronics at Teesside Park along with a hex crimp tool for the connectors (though my work has one of these I'd rather have one myself anyway as I intend to move on to crimp on PL259s as the other solder-on type are a pain to work with and more often than not it's a waste of time to solder the braid, I've found both to work find and never have gone off the air.
Testing the newly assembled thin jumper lead with BNCs required adaptors and my trusty 50-watt rated dummy load, which today for the first time completely failed due to a dry joint on the SO239, a bit of solder later and it works again, the cable was tested on both amateur frequencies (specifically 2 meters and 70cm) and CB, it seems to cause the SWR to rise a little but to be honest there is not much in it when used on CB, on 2-metres the SWR needle does not move, and on 70cm it moves as much as it does on 27MHz so a slight mismatch but I can live with it until I can think of a better way to run a coax through a double-glazed window,
The fibreglass mast and T2LT have not been erected and this may take place tomorrow as it is starting to get late now and of course I want to get dinner, in the mean time I may reconnect my 2-meter dipole to the Leixen and see if anyone is on the repeater, if I have one I may dig out a higher current PSU and see if running my CRT SS9900 will cause any issues, if not I should be good to go
73 de M6RSQ/26CT730
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