Well, the saga continues.
Tonight I put a better antenna on the softrock, when there should have been plenty of signals. But, my softrock is dead, even though it appears ok at first glance.
It can hear the strongest signals, but it's very deaf.
With no antenna connected to it, my softrock and a borrowed reference softrock have identical noise output with the baseline around -119 dbm. So, during the daytime with a really short antenna, it looks good.
Tonight I put on a better antenna, and could hear many signals with the borrowed softrock. But nothing on mine.
It turns out that the baseline for the reference unit with antenna connected was around -99 dbm, but my softrock only produces a baseline of -115 dbm.....and nothing heard except the absolute loudest signals that were barely whispers on my softrock.
Anyway, I'm crushed. I'll start out tomorrow with a borrowed MFJ antenna analyzer and make sure the input looks something close to 50 ohms on 7 Mhz.
I'm really glad I had the borrowed softrock to compare with-it was very helpful.
Regards,
Art
