Today I finally got around to working on the 7 Band Portable Dipole I wrote about earlier. I had finished building it, but hadn’t tried it out or even seen if it works.

One thing that delayed me was my MFJ-259B antenna analyzer was in pieces. A couple years ago, I dropped it on the floor. It landed face-down and smashed the tuning knob. In the process, it bent the shaft of the tuning capacitor and made it stick and short out as it turned. I ordered a replacement from MFJ and installed it, but it still had problems. It acted flakey. It turned out, although it looked fine upon inspection, the range switch was also damaged and was working intermittently. It sat on the shelf for a couple of years while I decided what to do with it. The antenna project made up my mind to look at it again.MFJ-259B All fixed!

I was dreading tearing into a multi-position rotary switch. I had visions of parts and wires hanging off every terminal. Fortunately, it was a PC-mount switch and every connection went through the PC board. If I could only get it off the PC board without destroying anything, I could replace it. So I carefully disassembled the ‘259 far enough to access the back of the switch. With some care to carefully desolder each pin and a little wiggling, the switch came out. I ordered one from MFJ, along with some of the plastic parts to the push buttons that had also flown off and been lost in the fall. Continue Reading…