I let the smoke out......(Part two of three)

[koØm]

My Radio room / Workshop is in the small unused bedroom that I have. My operating position was at a pre-fab desk that you get at Wally Mart and, a six foot long table that doubled as a workbench at times; It was ugly and old.

I was offered and acquired (see part one) a new desk unit and, I decided to replace the old furnishing in the radio room with this new desk. The removal of the old table and desk required that I do a clean up of the room and a strategy of disconnecting the radio equipment, audio interfaces, Serial to USB CAT cables, computer and, monitors had to be developed. Plus, there were at least 40 pieces of stuff that needed to be put back in it's proper place.

Importantly, I unhooked all the radio equipment from it's chassis ground, leaving the connecting coax attached to one side of the device and moved everything out of the room. I did not unhook the antenna tuner from the antenna outside, I chose to sit the tuner on the window sill where the feed-line goes out the window.

I put in the new desk and repopulated the room with the radio equipment in the same configuration as before with the same coax connections and individual grounds tied to a common point.

When I went to the preset spots for the different frequencies, the SWR was way off on every frequency, I could not tune the antenna to any band; in what was the setting for the 10 meter band, the 20 meter band tuned there and, I could not tune any higher frequency than that. Even there, the SWR was 1.7 to 1 UNTIL I put my hand on the Dentron tuner and the SWR dropped down to 1.2 to 1 ; I move my hand, it went back up. This only happened when i touched the tuner, not the radio, coax or meter, only the tuner.

I put one test clip lead on the tuner chassis and when I touched it, the SWR also went down during transmit; I clipped two alligator leads together to extend the wire to my operating position but, when I keyed the transmitter, I received a nasty RF burn from the ground of my tuner!

I let the smoke out, my station will not transmit properly and bites me when I touch it.

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