Clean up the 6BTV

I finally had some time to “play radio” this past week, after dropping my son off at preschool I decided to pull down my 6BTV and clean it up in hopes of better power output. I have been talking back and forth with DX Engineering, more specifically Rod and this time George. I have order additional hardware, such as the tilt base, radial plate and most recently the vertical feed current choke.

On DXE’s recommendation I pulled each tube apart and clean all the connections with steel wool and mineral spirits in order to assure a good, clean connection of aluminum. When I removed the trap covers on the 10m and 15m trap, they both had heavy oxidation on the connectors holding the coils for these bands. These are my prime suspects as to why 10m and 15m do not tune to an acceptable VSWR.

On the other end of the band, 40m has a VSWR of 1.5:1 and I get very good power output. I also added the 75/80m tip rod cut to 31″ of 3600MHz (PSK31 is 3580MHz). I measured the VSWR of nearly 1:1 on 75/80m, which made me very excited, unfortunately I was not able to have any luck with the other bands.

After cleaning I reassembled the vertical and measured each tube/trap to the factory default. Tomorrow I am going to attempt to slide the tubing in order to see if I can decrease the VSWR. I tried this same thing a month or so back while my father was in town and we did not have much luck on decreasing the VSWR.

Thankfully PSK31 is a low power mode and I can get away with 15w and have worked 40 QSOs on 20m and another 10 QSOs on 40m. I would like to have more output power in order to work SSB and hopefully RTTY and shortly CW.