putting all my RG213 to use and repairing the T2LT

With the crimp-on plugs having arrived earlier this week I set to work fitting them to the cables, starting off with the RG213, which is all now terminated and can be put to use, all of it tested into a dummy load showing no mismatch, these cables should see me through for a while, and will be used to feed antennas over the longer RG58 that came from the cut off piece of the groundplane antenna, which will receive a plug hopefully tomorrow.

The T2LT had a cut in the feedline outer jacket, I have cut this out and crimped on a new PL259 at that point, it will be tested tomorrow provided the wind dies down sufficiently, if not Wednesday, I noticed this cut during the Activate All Counties event last summer but the antenna was still working as the braid had not been compromised, just the outer jacket.

Another antenna I hope to test tomorrow if it gets completed and the wind dies down is the second dipole for 2-meters made from the metal strips found inside the rubber part of car windscreen wiper blades, the antenna is deliberately too long for 2-meters so will be cut to length in the field, it will be fed with the RG213 I have and the QYT KT8900D will be taken with me as it is less prone to pager noise than the Leixen VV-898 and once the SWR meter is removed the HTs may be damaged having a heavy coax connected to them, and should this antenna work it will be my go-to portable ops antenna, for campsite use I'll use my copper-wire dipole as this does work fine as I have had it on the air before.

I will post results of the new dipole on YouTube and on here, the T2LT, however, I will just post on here as I know the antenna does work OK

73 de 2E0EIJ/26CT730

T2LT choke dilemma

Now as you know, I am planning to build at least one T2LT antenna, using the design outlined in 26CTX104's video on his UKCBTV YouTube account, but I had a dilemma, what to use as the former for the choke, an important component that separates the antenna and coax as this antenna is not only a dipole for all intents and purposes, it is also made from the coax, I had a look at a few ideas, B & Q sold long lengths of soil pipe that had a slightly wide diameter and I could not transport on my scooter, Homebase were no good at all.

So I thought to myself "what do I already have that I could use?" after carefully measuring the diameter of various round objects (cocoa tin, golden syrup tin, fizzy drink bottle, cider bottle and empty marshmallow fluff tub) I then remembered that I still had the two pieces of tube I used for the choke on the ill-fated inverted-V dipole I was intending to use in the loft but for many reasons didn't, I measured this, bingo, 4" diamater, a quarter of an inch shy of 26CTX104's findings but should be fine if the turns are the same (around about 5, I've seen 5 turns on 4" former reported to work fine).

So, I intend to begin today by running out a short length of the coax I have, which is 100m of RG58 which I bought partly to do this, today, winding the choke, fitting a PL259 on the other end, sealing the plug up with some Sugru where the coax leaves it to stop water ingress (I have heatshrink but of the wrong diameter for the PL259), it will take around 24 hours for the Sugru to fully cure and I don't know if any operators have used it on their PL259s, perhaps this is a first, but perhaps not.

So, I'll let you know how I get on, also just need a fibreglass pole and some means to fasten the antenna to it, and I should be on the air very soon.


73 de 26CT730