Joe... At this time I'm not a Society Member, but that will change.
This is an updated E-mail I copied about last night.
====================================
Good evening, or morning to everyone,
Saturday evening, 12/8/12 we attempted to return the 1937 W9BSP-W9UA AM
Transmitter to the air after a 40 year hiatus. We had spent this last week
chasing down some final quirks, neutralizing, tuning and generally tweaking. We
completed testing Friday and felt that everything was in order.
This evening about 6 PM CDT, a light misting rain developed at the museum. At 7
PM, when we threw power to the wire, we found our SWR had gone off the scale.
We then rechecked the antenna system using the station's Icom 751 at 40 watts
AM. All Okay. Switching back to the transmitter the situation had not improved.
Loading the transmitter into a oil cooled dummy load showed that the problem did
not reside in the transmitter. A scramble then inssued to check each component
of the antenna system, bypassing and swapping out cables and the external tuner.
We determined that the 160 meter fullwave loop antenna was not handling the 350
watts PEP of AM carrier. We had checked this antenna previously and had a 1 to 1
match before the rain. At this point we tried our inverted V dipole without
success.The dipole had previously shown an issue with the high power of the 1937
transmitter, it had not been improved by the rain.
We then attempted to rematch the loop antenna system to the 1937 W9BSP
transmitter at power, so we could proceed with our Return to Air Event.
A sudden frying egg sound and the snap of an arc in the final tank circuit told
us that trying to load the wet antenna directly had failed. Switching back to
the dummy load showed us that we now had developed problems in the transmitter.
The air in the kitchen of the farmhouse that our radio room adjoins now had a
distinct ozone tinge. It was decided that we would have to cancel the event for
the evening.
We have great confidence that the current problems are correctable and we will
be rescheduling our event when we have resolved them. Our primary problem at
this time appears to keeping the antenna dry, or locating the weak spots in the
antenna system.
I would like to thank all those who came out to the Ensor Museum for the
evening, and everyone who participated in the impromptu standby net to hold 3885
for the event.
The W9BSP Ensor AM Transmitter will be heard!
73 to all
Joe Krout, W0PWJ
President,
Marshall Ensor Memorial Organization
www.w9bsp-w9ua.org