Simple Reason for ‘HI SWR’!

I had elevated my 80/20m loaded coil inverted V dipole antenna by about 1m, to a final height of about 7m from the ground, to see if the decrease in ground capacitance will improve the performance of the antenna. After the work on the terrace, went inside and checked the SWR. To my surprise, I found uniformly ‘HI SWR’ on all bands, even on the 20 and 30m bands on which it was working fairly well prior to that. As I had some other urgent work to do, I did not go and check again on the terrace. Today morning, I went back to the terrace and immediately the cause was quite evident. The joints between the RG213 coax and the antenna elements had given way some time between my antenna elevation and checking the SWR! Corrected it and now SWR is back to the previous situation.

My CQ call on 14010 kHz has been picked up at VU2PTT on the Reverse Beacon Network at 171 miles from here, with a signal to noise ratio of 22dB, the highest I have received so far, that to at 9.30 am on 20m! For those new to Reverse Beacon Network, it is a network of automatic stations which receive CQ calls on multiple bands and skim the callsigns and report them to the network accessible online. RBN is very useful to study the propagation of your signals. All you have to do is to call CQ a couple of times with your callsign. Even if no one answers your call, all stations which receive your call in the RBN will automatically post it to the web portal with time, frequency, signal to noise ratio, speed of the CW call and distance from your station.