Balun day at Amateur Radio NSW

Today was "balun day" which began with breakfast followed by a terrific talk from Mark, VK2XOF, about the theory and practice of building current baluns. The biggest mystery for me is what core to use.

After the theory, and lunch, we all received out balun kits from TET-Emtron. I went for the TB-11K 1:1 kit rated at 1kW peak. We then built our kits under the guidance of folks who had built them before.

Finally there was a spectrum analyser and antenna analyser on hand to measure the baluns. Some home constructed baluns were found to have high reflected power which was very interesting to see.

The method for assessing a balanced to unbalanced balun's operation is to attach a 50 ohm load on to the antenna terminals, feed it from an antenna analyser and connect one and then the other of the antenna terminals to the ground of the input and see if the impedance changes very much - if all is working well it should not change.

My sincere thanks to the ARNSW committee and all who clearly worked hard to make this day a great success. Thanks also to TET-Emtron for producing the fantastic kits and for their support.