G'day all, the whole fault finding process is too involved to go into, but the other day I found that a critical short RG213 patchcord was braid intermittent at one end of the PL259 plug.

It had been like that for quite a few years, causing some weird and wonderful symptoms and faults! :yes: Needless to say my whole HF Ham station is now working a lot better including much improved transmit reports. That faulty patchcord was apparently contributing very significant loss 'on transmit'. :yes: Regards, Felix (vk4fuq) aka catman.

Some times, the small items cause big problems. I am glad to hear that you found this one. 73

Reminds me of the time I found the cause of some AM broadcast band intermodulation products trashing a favorite but weak AM station. Did the usual hunting, with a portable radio, and eventually found that it was, of all things, a loose UHF connector on the back of my TS440SAT HF rig, which I hadn't used for some time. Seems that the coax cable running from the vertical in my back yard (which is well grounded), then thru the rig, and then the power supply, negative output also connected to the ground (earth) wire of the 3 wire power cord, thru the outlet and house wire which leads to the electric service entrance safety ground, formed a nice big loop of wire to capture a significant amount of AM radio signal energy. And I thought it was gonna be a rusty rain gutter or such...

Imagine the problems I would have had had I decided to get on HF with that connector loose like that...