N9VJY: A 20-Foot Flagpole, 100 Watts, and the Tuner That Looked Like the Antenna

Jim Scholz, N9VJY, put up a 20' DX Flagpole in West Allis, Wisconsin, in September. A few weeks later he hit the wall some new owners hit: 20 through 10 meters tuned fine, but 40, 80 and 160 would not.

He didn't give up on the antenna, and he didn't guess. He worked the problem, and he found it in the shack. The contacts inside his older roller-inductor manual tuner had gone dirty with age. Cleaned up, the tuner matched the bands it had refused. He finished, in his words, just in time for the contest.

Then CQ World Wide SSB opened, and he got on the air with 100 watts.

"The antenna is doing great," Jim wrote after the weekend. The log above is his short list of what one 20-foot flagpole and a 100-watt radio did from the Milwaukee area on a contest weekend.

N9VJY's 20' DX Flagpole, flag lowered for the photo. Clean, neat, and nothing a homeowner couldn't do.

The Lesson: When It Looks Like the Antenna, Check the Tuner

A wide-range tuner is half of every Greyline station. A vertical dipole presents a different impedance on every band, which is how one feedpoint covers 160 through 6 meters with no traps and no radials. The tuner does the matching, band by band.

A manual tuner does that job with switch contacts and a roller inductor, and both wear and oxidize over the years. A dirty contact adds resistance right where the current is highest, and it comes and goes as the roller moves. The symptom is exactly what Jim saw: some bands tune, others won't, or a band tunes and then loses it. That looks like antenna trouble. It isn't.

The low bands fail first because they ask the tuner for the most inductance, which runs the roller deep into its travel, across the contacts that wear the most. When 20 through 10 are happy and 40 through 160 are not, look in the shack before you look up the pole. A borrowed tuner settles it in an afternoon; Jim's friend's solid-state tuner told the same story his cleaned-up manual tuner did.

One more note on 160: it asks more of a tuner than any other band on a vertical this size, so test it last, after everything else is matching well.

If a band won't tune at your station, our six-step First Tune-Up check is in the menu under Owners & Support. Most cases clear up in the first three steps.

Where the Low-Band Conversation Lives

Operators have been comparing notes on 160 meters, tuners and verticals for decades on the TopBand reflector. Its archive is the best free education on the low bands anywhere: the TopBand archive.

And if you worked CQ World Wide this year, post your score at 3830scores.com with #Greyline in the soapbox. Any score counts, and it puts your call on the Greyline Roll Call.

The Antenna

Jim's antenna is the 20' DX Flagpole: every band from 160 through 6 meters, no radials, and a real flag on top, so the neighbors see a flagpole. Add the Tilt-Up Base and one person walks it down for maintenance or ahead of a storm.

Ham Radio is fun again! Pass it on.

73,
Jon KL2A