jan olieslagers wrote:
On my first cross-country solo, I observed everybody was clearly
readable by everybody - except nobody could understand ME clearly.
The radio on the club plane is an Icom A200, quite common I believe and
not too bad quality though it is on the cheap side. But I can't imagine
my poor transmission was due to the radio so next suspect is the
antenna, in comes the buzzword "SWR" . Is there a published procedure
for checking SWR on an existing installation?
Any other possible causes? Antenna location perhaps, or lack of ground
plane? But that should show on SWR-verification too, shouldn't it?
TIA,
KA

Standing Wave ratio is a concern for radio amateurs who wish to operate
transceivers on widely different frequencies. They use a box with a
directional transmission line section, and compare the power going in
the transmitter-wards direction with the amount coming back.
Their SWR measuring boxes are not expensive but are typically set up for
the use of UHF connectors which are those screw in coax connectors about
twice the diameter of the BNC connectors you may see on some scopes and
hand-helds. Perhaps a simpler approach would be substituting the
installed antenna by a test antenna and feed cable as a test.
One of RST's tape antennas intended for glass fuselages would make a
cheap test antenna for instance.

Brian W