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  • CQ Amateur Radio

    GORDO’S SHORT CIRCUITS

    Mar 01, 2020 5 minutes
    BY GORDON WEST, WB6NOA

    (Whaddaya want? Good Grammar or Good Signals? –ed)

    After all the storms on both the left and right coasts this winter, lots of hams with trap tri-band beams tell me their antennas have gone whacko on being resonant on the 20-, 15-, and 10-meter bands. They are dreading doing the tower climb (see next topic) to take them down, and see what is going on with the antenna.

    If your multi-element three-band beam — maybe four bands with 40 meters as an added rotatable dipole — uses traps, the traps likely are NOT BAD! They are probably just waterlogged.

    When snow and severe rain get into the trap sections, water starts pooling within the traps, and this added capacitive reactance throws each trap off frequency until the trap dries out completely. This

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