The 2 Meter set up gave me fits this morning. I'd work a station out to 1100 miles and then have trouble completing with a power-house like K7MAC at 600 miles. Sheer persistence paid off with 10 contacts. Sometime didn't seem right.
Turns out the TE Systems amp is oscillating and hanging up at times refusing to go back to receive, and acting generally weird. I tried ferrite clamp-ons on the power leads, different length of coax, and checked the screws on the antennas T match and looked at the SWR etc. trying to fix the problem.
Big clue - Putting the amp into a dummy load fixed the problem, so it looks like just too much RF in and around the trailer - I know the house wiring for the RV runs through the ceiling. No matter how high I get the antenna it still persists.
The good news is that when the amp is happy it still puts out 200 watts. More good news was that I brought enough tools and a dummy load along just in case!
Anyhow I'll try DN75 2M only tomorrow with just the truck. Here's the plan given that I don't expect to have Internet:
I should be on 144.144 MHz around 1200z tomorrow morning. I'll call CQ generally east for 30 minutes, then shift to generally westerly 30 minutes and then south 30 minutes etc. If you hear me say something on Ping Jockey to help folks figure out what I'm doing. Who knows maybe I'll have Internet, but that's pretty "out there" country-side. I will send a 73 tone to help folks know we're complete.
The two times I've used the truck I don't remember having this issues, so that's a good thing.
Onward,
Gene