I’m having a hell of a time with my 2 month old buddipole.
After I received it, I followed the instruction, set it up and was immediately able to get an SWR just under 2, not perfect but good enough. I used it a couple of times for portable ops with a 705.
I bought it home, put it up in the back yard, connected to a 7300, same deal, low enough SWR the 7300’s internal tuner could deal with it.
I left the tripod up with the versatee and the connector but removed the arms over night and kept them inside.
The following day, no matter what I do the SWR is over 3, enough so that the 7300’s internal tuner won’t deal with it, I have a tuner for the 705 (for playing with long wire stuff) and it will tune it, but at that point virtually nothing is being radiated from the antenna.
thus far I have:
tested the existing coax and connectors (excluding the buddipole BNC-Binding post connector) with a dummy load
tested different coax and connectors (sans the buddipole binding post)
tested the coils, whips and arms for continuity
cleaned off any oxidization
nothing… at this point i’m at a loss, I have an antenna analyzer on the way to try and help me pin down my issue but any pointers would be appreciated.
I definitely use an antennal analyzer to get my Buddiepole tuned and I appreciate the frustrations with it. I have found that the instructions are a good starting point (connect to green and go out 5 segments) but they didn’t match the way I used it.
When I am tuning it, I don’t want to spend a ton of time moving the connection on the coil, but I have found I get the best results when I use less coil and as much of the whip as I can.
I have found that dialing in the SWR can be really fussy if the two sides of the dipole are not balanced. I don’t have a good method for that but just to watch it making your changes as evenly as possible.
I just used mine 2 weeks ago at a POTA activations (Marconi Site at Cape Cod) and I was able to dial in 40 meters at around 1.4:1 which is good for me.
@JimWRL - you were spot on, it’s the coils, with the tap jumpers pulled and whips extended it’s SWR is 1.2 at 7050khz, put the tap jumpers anywhere and the SWR is 10+ all over the board.