I have to apologise to the chasers on HF who have been faithfully responding to my spots over the last few weeks as I activated a wheen of summits for the Winter bonus.
I was hoping to finish in style today since the HF bands came back to life on Saturday after the solar event last weekend, but alas it was not to be.
I got to the top of Ward Law, GM/SS-119 in the cloud, but with little wind and set up the link dipole and hung the 2m and 70cm flowerpots from the back guys. I had a listen on 40m and 15m. I could hear a tantalising station from Nova Scotia on 15m and some s2s stations from Austria but the signals seemed to come and go quite a bit and I discovered that the feeder connection at the back of the radio was intermittent and wouldn’t allow me to transmit. I fiddled with it for a while to see if I could hold it in a place where it worked but it wasn’t to be.
Fortunately I managed 5 QSO’s on 2m so managed to qualify the activation.
I’ll get the feeder out and fit a new connector for next time,
Andy
MM7MOX
If it was a PL-259 it was just a divine message tell you to use a proper connector next time.
It is indeed the screen frayed at the crimp on the PL-259.
I’ll repair it tomorrow, but I also have a piece of RG-316 that I rescued from the bin that will get a pair of BNC’s fitted and probably become my primary dipole feed from now on.
The crimp PL-259 for RG-174 isn’t really a robust combination for field use.
Although this cable has lasted about 50 activations so far I think it now becomes a spare.
Andy
MM7MOX
My learned RF friends Messrs. Barry GM4TOE and Mark GM4ISM told me that RG-316 does not like solder and crimping is the correct way to fit. Something about solder wicking up the wire and making it brittle. I’m not sure if that means the centre pin has to be crimped as well.
Nah, you can solder that (unless it is a crimp-crimp connector 
).
At risk of teaching you to suck eggs.
I use a double layer of heatshrink tubing at each end of my feeder, especially the skinny stuff. I use a size that fits over the first part of the connector. This works fine with crimped or soldered plug types, but not the compression type, which are bulkier. No issues so far, be it PL-259 or BNC. 
Double heatshrinking works well. I used to get heatshrink from work in the distant past, there were heaps of offcuts for the bin. But recently it’s all been bought from rallies or eBay vendors. What’s amazing is the sheer range of sizes and thicknesses. Most of it has a thin wall thickness and I use two slightly different sizes for double wrapping. The second layer can make a significant difference to strength.
I bought some crimp connectors that came with a length of heatshrink in each bag. It had a noticeably thicker wall thickness. There doesn’t appear to be any need to double wrap with that. It may have been glue-lined too.
Fascinating stuff heatshrink because it “twists your melons” as things don’t shrink when you heat them but expand. In heatshrink tubing, the material is made say 2mm ID and then radiation treated to crosslink the polymers. Then it is heated till the crystalline structure melts and stretched over a die to expand it to the unshrunk size and flash cooled. The result is it stays the larger diameter. When you then heat it, the crystalline structure melts and the tube shrinks to its original size. The clever bit is stretching such that the length doesn’t change so it keeps the same length when heat in situ. The crosslinking helps with that.
Clever people these material scientists.