Testing the 10/11-meter antenna

Today I took a drive up to the Whashton Road end of the old racecourse in Richmond, since my last forays onto 10 and 11 meters up there there have been some houses built nearby and some are already occupied, my worry here was that some were full of the spectrum polluting PLT devices, however the noise floor remained relatively unchanged.

After putting the antenna on the roof of my car once I'd unscrewed the broadcast antenna to allow room for the magmount, I connected the SWR meter and the CRT SS9900, the SWR was about 2.8:1 right at the top of the band whereas with the President Grant II on 11-meters as this radio is a legal type approved radio for that band the SWR was 1.2:1 right at the bottom (26.965MHz) and about 1.5:1 at the top (27.99125MHz) near the boundary between there and 10-meters, suggesting I might have a long antenna here for 10-meters, the idea is to make it so it's a happy medium on both bands as I want to be able to use both.

After these tests, and a check to ensure the 2/70 antenna was performing as it ought to be (there had been no change on how that antenna was behaving with an extra antenna present), I did a drive test from Whashton Road to Catterick Garrison, namely Tesco as I was in need of a few things, I had the Grant II connected and decided just for amusement purposes listen to UK channel 19, perhaps one or two stations in the noise as driving into and through Richmond revealed the town to be in an electro smog, presumably down to a lot of cheap and nasty Chinese sourced Christmas light power supplies with the light strings themselves acting as a crude and nasty antenna, and add PLT to that mix and whatever else, on leaving town the noise floor dropped but went up again shortly after I entered Catterick Garrison, the antenna was fine on the car with no incidents, the one thing i did notice is that it was not far from the ceiling of the petrol station canopy when I went in for petrol to get me covered for work.

So this evening I put a plug onto the Grant II and plugged it into the cigarette lighter socket on the car, this didn't matter as it was mainly for listening, again UK19 which either lacked muppets or they were so down in the noise I couldn't hear them and no amount of "kilowatt burner" would get them over it, there was at least one clear transmission but it had no audio that I could tell (the rig was behind the passenger seat as I needed to use the passenger seat for my deliveries tonight).

With me working tonight only one of my fellow drivers noticed the antenna, though I think they saw it earlier in the day when I was parked up in Tesco.

I'll get the video finished off and up at some point tomorrow, and maybe just have a search online for any active CB nets until I can figure out how to get this thing to work on both 10 and 11 meters.

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