What use is an F-call?

When you operate your station on a regular basis you might find yourself lulled into the belief that all is well with the world and that your station will continue to operate as expected. It worked yesterday, so why wouldn't it work today - nothing changed.

Having now operated my station for several years and having been granted the opportunity to operate stations built and maintained by others I can categorically state that nothing stays the same, ever.

In fact, it's probably better to work on the assumption that your station is changing all the time, that it's different than it was yesterday and even different than it was an hour ago.

This variation is the result of a number of things that affect the operation of your station. The weather is an obvious influence. Antennas are subject to the wind, the rain and the sun, not to mention lightning and atmospheric ionisation. But the weather is not the only variable.

Power supplies are fed by the grid which fluctuates, power supplies heat up and cool down, so does your radio, the connectors that connect the coax to your radio and the like.

If you have an amplifier, it too heats up and cools down. Contraction and expansion slowly doing their physics to trip you up.

Jostling a connector, or a coax might disconnect something that has been connected for years, or doing a test, plugging an antenna into another radio, might just be the straw that broke the camel's back.

My point is that even in a so-called static environment, things change, all the time. If you pick up your radio and go mobile with it, you're used to things being in different places, wear and tear and the like, but in your home station, you might not find such things nearly as easily.

So, pay attention to what your radio is saying, watch the SWR, the power, the voltage, use the meters that are there to tell you that something is wrong. One day it will make the difference between a quick fix and a $1000 repair.

Just because it's working right now, doesn't mean it will be the next time you key the mike.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB