MFJ 1798 Antenna Snafu

OARS member Bernie, WB6PFH, recently encountered a problem installing his newly purchased MFJ-1798 10 band vertical antenna. Firstly, a few small parts were missing from the shipment, including the 2 meter stub. After working around the missing parts and assembling the unit as per the the included  assembly instructions, the antenna was inoperable and its input measured a dead short.

The manufacturer was of little help. Bernie was told the color coding on the termination wires had been changed and how it should be connected. The MFJ antenna guy also said the input should measure 3 to 4 ohms. That was all they could offer.

As a last ditch effort to avoid returning the antenna to the manufacturer, Bernie and two club members spent a couple of hours testing and inspecting the troublesome antenna and reviewing the instruction manual. In the end the problems were a reversed connection on the confusingly wrong colored wires coming out of the termination card and the return wires from the counterpoise top section being tied back to the wrong points.

The bottom line is that the manual is ambiguous in enough places to leave the assembler guessing as to what the writer intended. Also, the assembly drawings often did not provide enough detail to clarify the terse text in the instructions. The resistance figures quoted by MFJ were also wrong. A final measurement on the working antenna input connection read infinite resistance, not 3 to 4 ohms.

All we are waiting for now are contact reports from WB6PFH.

Left to right:  W7XZ  WB6PFH  AF6HS