Dear Rolph,
When we started flying GELSA in Lakeland we had a similar problem, reception
OK but poor & intermittent transmit & yes it was an antenna problem -
clearly the antenna is required to handle much greater power for
transmitting.
We replaced the existing welding rods with copper tape in the fin close out
but were unable to obtain any ferrite torroids. I therefore made up a
"balun" from a loop of the RG58 cable from a published design which should
be available on the net somewhere. Goodness knows how this works but after
trimming the copper tape there was a sudden dramatic reduction in VSWR
reading and our radio performance was transformed.
It worked for us, just don't ask me why!
Rog.
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