eddie,
i asked my buddy if he would unwind the choke to see if the tv trouble came back, he said he's not climbing up to remove it because it definitely did stop the problem for a while until he moved the tv
Well I figured as much and posted same earlier. So, we still can't be sure what might have happened, and I don't buy the fact Bob, that a fix that you did only worked for a short time...is really to be considered a fix, because of the following............
This is not out of disrespect, but like Homer said, there may be multiple things at play in this scenario. If your suggesting this fix successful and worked for a couple of days, and then it just stopped its 100 watts prevention of TVI, that is not logical to me.
Else that would suggest to me that the Gain Master's choke, which appears from all reports to work flawlessly, may necessarily have to be located in a specific place in space, in order to allow the antenna to work as intended...and any other place it was located would render it totally useless, like you and Homer are suggesting is what happened and was likely due to simply moving a TV.
Man, that's taking two steps forward and three steps backward to reach that conclusion.
Maybe Sirios choke is better designed and located in its application on the GM than the choke that ya'll added, but IMO the only judgment we could ever have using a choke is whether it works or not. Just a few days of seeming good results, and then on moving a TV see it all stop working, dead in it's tracks, should create a big question in the reader's mind...whether the fix was a success or not.
A real goober posted a thread the other day claiming some results on his 259B, suggested he had to add 11.5" to the top element in his Imax, that is before his meter would show a good match, somewhere in the CB band I presume.
Well, after he added a 11.5" piece of 1/2" diameter all thread with suitable fittings to mate up, he recounted to us a couple of wild and unbelievable advantages he observed while working his new modified rig on the air...in addition to his 259B showing a perfect match.
Then almost in the same breath he claimed after adding 11.5" the 259B reported a perfect match up over 28.000 mhz somewhere. I of course took exception to his claim, just like I'm trying to do here. You might have seen the thread on Mauldroppers:
http://www.mauldroppers.com/showthread.php?20349-Imax-2000-1-1-Match-Lasted-1-1-2-Hours
He is still claiming the mode was a success, but I believe that was a failed attempt to modify his Imax.
He admits it only lasted for 1.5 hours before it stopped working.
Does this sound like a similar story to what you're telling us, regarding your buddy's problem with TVI and the choke you added as a fix. I think so.
All I've got to ask now: Is your ego so inflated that everything you touch or talk about has always got to be considered a total success and the truth regardless of the end results? It's great to have confidence in one's own efforts, and I've always had a good feeling of that in hearing and reading your post on the Internet, but this reminds me of a comment from the character Fletcher...we've all seen and heard from an old Clint Eastwood movie, "Outlaw Josey Wales,"
"Senator: Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining."
Bob, you know where I'm going with my idea here, we talked about this idea that height affects common mode currents in such a way as to possibly control the magnitude enough to mitigate the problem in such a way as to not be a problem. It was of course all hypothetical, because the only source of info I had was some remarks made by W8JI and/or Cebik on the subject of baluns.
Of course I have read Cebik's last remarks, and that stuck a note in my thinking not to forget. I repeated this idea a few times, that to use height to mitigate CMC would be iffy at best, simply because we'll likely never know how far away we are from the true ground on the shield side of the feed line. That gives a reader the idea that the ground ain't likely to be any where near as short as the feed line, itself, that we might use. That said would change the noted height I see in modeling, because it is plan for me to see the ground is always right at the bottom of the mast in most of my models, and that is likely very different than a real life response. Don't you think the idea of how height alone affects CMC is worthy of consideration. That is my point in this whole discussion, and is probably why W8JI and Cebik mentioned the idea too. I surely am NOT the one that discovered the idea, I'm just the only one talking about it here.
This all came to my mind on reading W8JI on the topic of the Imax and his making a claim that this CMC issue could all be due a "worst case scenario," regarding a particular bad install height.
So with that said, I made an assumption that there could also possibly be a "best case scenario," and I talked and emailed you about it...maybe as far back as 2009."
I recall you dismissed my idea out of hand, so maybe you don't recall.
This is long I know, but I hope this helps explain my thinking on this subject.