What a day for the radios.
Well today as posted about earlier that I pulled out the two other radios. I got the power adapter built. I am supplying the power to the Alinco that is being used by the Icom. I also tuned up an antenna for my Alinco, it works well, only has a 1.4:1 SWR on both bands. At first today I thought the radio was damaged because I tried a different antenna, it is a “real” dual band antenna, but it does not work at all, there is so much reflected power that the radio’s output power is cut so low that it does not even register on the power meter. But an hour after trying this antenna, I tried one of my other antenna, it is just a mag mount and a nineteen inch rod in it. I worked on it till I tuned it down on 2 meters, when I got it down to 1.2:1 on 2 meters I started to work on 70 centimeters, got it down to 1.4:1 then I checked out the SWR on 2 meters and it read 1.4:1 this time, so I figured it was below the 1.5:1 that they say is the area you want to keep it in, so I was happy and just left it there. Then I started to make another 100 feet antenna out of speaker wire, for a HF reciver that a friend gave me about a year and a half ago. I am not have as much luck with it as I wish I was having with it. But right now I am barley getting something but, I have only spent about one hour tuning thought the bands, so I can not really say one way or the other. I stopped playing with that antenna because the mic on the Icom started to stick and I could not get it to unkey. At that point I was in a QSO with some other hams, so I just jumped over to the Alinco and turned off the Icom. I took the mic off and took it apart to see what was wrong. I was able to find where it was sticking but I can not say what was wrong, nor did I know how to fix it. But when I put it back together it seams to be working again. Another ham suggested to me I might want to try (the next time the mic sticks) cleaning the parts that are sticking inside the mic with some pure alcohol.
