[Tech-Assist] STL problem now critical

[Milton Holladay]

With hundreds of feet of coax,  at 950 mHz, the reflected power reading 
is experiencing a lot of loss, and may be getting into the foolya range.

If I had a competent tower guy on hand, what I would do is, while 
feeding  power into the receive end from an STL xmtr:
1] Send him up to  the receive dish with the watt meter and a dummy load 
to find out:
   A] how much power is going into the antenna
   B] how much power is reflected
   C] how much you can get  into the dummy load, with and without 
jumpers, if possible.

If no problem is found, go to the xmit end and repeat the above.
Those should be pretty good tests of the coaxial elements integrity. The 
reflected power on the receive end makes me a little  more suspicious of 
it than the xmit end.

I believe it is also probably possible to feed a xmtr through a 
wattmeter  into a drive element on the ground and get a valid reading, 
keeping the element away from metallic things or using a wire fence to 
approximate the dish. (    I haven't tried this, but would if facing a 
situation of this sort.  )( Drive elements do go bad, occasionally, too..  )
Your thought about swapped elements could certainly be valid, too, given 
that the system performance has always been poor.

We await your findings; good luck!.......
M