Audio Issues - The Saga Continues

RF and Grounding?

I'm really trying to track this down, because it's getting a little frustrating.  Here are the things that I'm seeing and hearing.

• When I tune the radio up in CW mode and flip the Transmit switch (either while connected to the tuner's dummy load or while connected to the antenna thru the tuner), I get a steady 100+ watts out.
• When I talk into the dummy load in the tuner, the ALC meter and the watt meter behave as expected.
• When I talk into the antenna, the ALC meter doesn't move as far and I don't send out as much power.  The ALC goes up to about 1/3 of the way and then immediately drops back down; the wattmeter maybe hits 30 watts and then drops back down as well.
• What few contacts I have made lately have a hard time hearing me; they report some sort of clipping and/or distortion.
• I do know that I seem to have a problem with the relay contacts in my microphone.  If I squeeze the grip bar too tightly, it causes the ALC meter to jump really high.

Given the first four points above, it sounds like RF getting back into the radio.  My first thought is that I do need to ground my station.  This is one thing that I know I need to do.  I need to run a ground wire around from my service entrance to outside the shack (about 75 feet around the perimeter of the house) and bond it to another ground rod; then I need to run a wire to the back of the radio and to the tuner.

It has rained for 2 days straight here; I don't think I have any water in my coax on my homemade dipole, because I can tune to 1:1 SWR on various parts of the 40, 20, 15, and 10 meter bands.

Another thing I need to do is shorten my feed coax.  I have a hundred feet of it, most of which is just lying outside the house on the ground (the center of my dipole is about 15 feet off the ground, and only about 10 feet from the shack - but I have 100 feet of coax).  I've felt bad about cutting this coax, as my friend Keith WA9DRO passed it along to me.  But, I think it's time to cut this one to length; I'll just buy him a replacement.

My friend Fred, W0FMS, suggested using ladder line to feed the dipole - less loss, but takes a little more care getting it into the house.

Microphone Issues

I also need to clean the relay contacts in the microphone and adjust the spring for the grip bar, so that I don't have to constantly worry about squeezing it too hard.  So, I took it apart:

I can already see that I need to straighten a couple of the relay springs in addition to cleaning the contacts.  Here is a closer view:

I'm chalking all of this up to being part of the learning experience.  But it's a little aggravating to not even be able to reliably check in to a semi-local net (MidCARS on 7.258) - and it's even more aggravating to hear Japan and Venezuela and Brasil and Spain coming in at S9 and not be able to contact them.

I'll get it figured out.  In the meantime, I keep practicing tuning the radio.  I also need to adjust my S-meter; it doesn't go all the way down to zero.  I can't really adjust it for S9 without a signal generator (which I don't have).

I hope to be back on the air soon!

73 de Mike K9MJA