Great Time On The Iowa Today

And I'm beeeeeat!

We worked several hundred stations, including the Battleship Wisconsin, the carrier Hornet, and the submarine Pampanito.

I spent about an hour on 40 Meters with the Hornet, talking to Scouts who were working on their Radio Merit Badges, and needed some "air time" to fulfill one of the badge requirements.

Took some pix of the event, which I'll post tomorrow, and I figured out why our Disc-Cage antenna hasn't been working to our expectations after the new cables were run, and all the multicouplers were checked.

The two cables were labeled backwards!

The cable marked "4~10MHz" was swapped with the cable marked "10~30MHz", leading us to use the wrong antenna for the frequencies we wanted to operate on.

I wanted to sweep the two sections of the antenna with my RigExpert AA-520 so I could see how well it compared to whatever gear the guys that ran the new cables swept it with. I swept one section of it, and having the results look completely wrong, swept the other section and compared the two graphs.

As soon as I looked at the graphs side-by-side, it smacked me like the proverbial two-by-four up the side of the head that the results were opposite what the labels on the two cables would lead you to believe.

Oh, well.....the only people that actually operate radio gear on this antenna have been informed, and I printed some new labels, with the date on them, that I'll install on the cables the next time I'm aboard the Iowa.

G'night, all......