My Inverted L antenna begins its journey skyward at the base of an old oak tree. A 600 watt remote tuner is installed there, along with multiple radials into the woods and yard. The “L” wire comes down from a tree branch overhead and attaches to the Antenna port of the tuner.
Like many “ham” things that tuner isn’t the most robust design. While I use this with a barefoot K3s, and follow the warning to never tune with more than 20 watts, the tuner has an annoying “Auto Tune” feature that starts the tuning process above some internal SWR setting. With a wire antenna in the trees, sometimes strange things happen to the SWR as the antenna moves around. In fact, one day on 75 meters that happened while I was transmitting, and the tuner went into Auto Tune. That was all it took to burn something out — the tuner was never the same. It stayed out of service for the past couple of months until my daughter and I replaced the tuner. So bad luck item #1.
About 10 days ago, my shack PC caught on fire. I chronicled that, and was back on the air a few days ago. Bad luck item #2
This past Friday/Saturday, we had a bad coastal storm. It blew a branch down that fell between the oak tree and the tuner. The tuner survived, but the antenna attachment broke off as you can see in the photo below. It was easy to reattach the antenna wire. That was bad luck item #3.
So either bad luck travels in threes as they say, or someone is trying to tell me to keep off the air. I hope it’s the former.
