Last of the Many

Last week, having reached various savings goals, I decided I'd splash-out with the now spare monthly cash on a roller-coaster antenna matching unit - or 'ATU'.

Over the years, I've acquired various large air-spaced capacitors and a nice, motorised roller inductor. But I've never really put it all together in a decent way, though it is not electrically difficult. Making a decent box, incorporating a SWR meter and so on takes time and, often, more money than you hoped would be the case!. 

MFJ-986. A nice unit, but that counter...

 

So, I had a look around for a MFJ 986, a unit I've looked at for years. MFJ ceased trading last year, so if I didn't grab a 986 that might be on a shop shelf somewhere soon, I'd likely never get one because, once you've bought one, even if it's not that well-built and it fails, the components inside are valuable and easily reusable, so are unlikely to find their way to the used market.

Radioworld happened to have a new 986, so I ordered it. Within minutes of its arrival, I was regretting the purchase - though my despair was a bit premature, as you'll see.

The trouble was the turns counter - a fairly cheap and not especially well-engineered unit that has a small, plastic worm drive connected to a slightly wobbly shaft to which the inductor shaft is connected via gears. As I turned the inductor, the counter kept skipping at every turn.

The upper, small gear was attached too far back along the counter shaft, as it serves to keep a plastic worm gear within the counter in place on the counter's gearing. After repositioning the gear, things got a lot better, but large changes in inductor position can sometimes lead to skipping. I added a small amount of grease to the gears, though this isn't really necessary.

 

I filed a return and refund and had even booked DHL to collect the box the following day. They never showed up. I decided I'd keep the unit because it was likely I could either fix the counter or else add something that would work better - maybe an optical encoder or the like. The warranty was largely useless in terms of a direct replacement, because it's unlikely there will be any available in up to a year's time, now MFJ is out of business.

My son and I took to opening the cabinet. All but two of the self-tappers came away easily. One came away by pulling and screwing with pliers. The other's thread had been so stripped on assembly that it needed the application of a rotary tool cutting wheel! 

Inside, the 986 is, like all MFJ products, actually quite decent in terms of quality and assembly, but it is very deep, owing to the large capacitor and inductor. It's a real shame they didn't decide to install a much higher quality turns counter and up the price a little; it has been the cause of some redesign in the past, moving from a belt system - which slipped - to the present gears. So they should have done better than just tinker with it.

Innards of the 986. It's a decent build. As for mine, the battery cable is best either removed as surplus to requirements or taped down, rather than left loose. Courtesy N8IE.

 

The counter was easily removed with two small screws and I found the worm drive off the gear-driven shaft was too far forward, because the gear itself had been screwed on too far back to retain it in place. Though this seemed to work fine after reintalling, it did skip very occasionally the following day when I turned the control fairly rapidly and across long lengths of the inductor. Another dismantle-reinstall cycle seemed to be stable and so it was time to build up the table of inductor and capacitor positions for each band.

The good news is that the amount of inductance needed to match my 30m-cut delta loop, which I use on 40-10m when the ATU is inline, requires very little of the coil at all; the 30m-upper 10m bands only needs the range counter to move from 154 to 162 and the hand control to move just a single rotation or so - meaning the opportunity for the counter to jump is very low as there are no large, rapid turns needed at all.

I'd love to put a perspex cover on the 986, as it's a work of art to behold. But stray RF above 21MHz causes hang-ups via the computer mouse cable and, at ordinary working power, may also cause the computer itself to crash. So, back on with the metal case, with only a few screws installed for any future attention to the counter that may be necessary.

I will certainly look to try and install a counter that's more robust in the coming weeks. But as it stands, the 986 is still a pleasure to use. It has a nice, large LED-lit SWR meter with good accuracy and tuning is very quick. The only issue of note is that the 986 is made with US power levels (up to 3kW!) in mind, so the power out meter has poor resolution below 10W, making setting 1W accurately for WSPR a bit tricky initially, until I find out where the needle should lie. But that's really nit-picking.

The 986 is big, but it does a good job.

 

Would I pay £560-odd for it again? I'm not sure. If the counter were solid, I'd definitely buy it again. But that cheap counter shouldn't be in such an expensive item and so if I reran the purchase, I'd opt for a Palstar, which get good reviews. Sadly, that would be an additional £150 or so, unless you were lucky to find a used unit somehow - there is a lot of competition and thus quite high prices when they appear on Ebay.

The other comparison I have to make is with my 941E, which has fixed, rather than continuous induction settings. There's nothing wrong with this after 16 years' daily use and matching is pretty much perfect on every band. It's also a nice, compact size for UK operators unlikely to go above 100W - unlike the huge 986! The 941 is light enough to take on /p operations - as I have. 

Really, the 986 is more a luxury, nice thing to have that makes matching just a little more civilised, allows for a somewhat, though academically-better match than the 941E, and the big meter is much easier to see. Overall, if you're careful about where your money goes, the 986 and kW-rated units like it are something to skip. The saving grace, I suppose, is that if you do buy one, it's at least only a once-in-a-lifetime purchase!

 

 

Wireless Phone Charger - More RFI!

My son brought home a wireless charger for his Apple phone the other day. A generic model from Argos, I grumbled that it probably produces a load of RFI.

Does it?

A quick hook-up this morning shows that, yes, it produces pulsed RFI on 28MHz (it's likely the same or worse on other bands). It's fairly low level when the charger base is just on and sitting there, but bringing my hand in close proximity to it produced a big increase in noise, as you would expect from the capacitive coupling. It might produce continuous RFI when a phone is lying on it and charging is underway, but I haven't checked that yet.

The good news is that, with the addition of a substantial Type 31 split ferrite with at least two, close-fitting windings of the supply cable, the RFI was removed pretty much completely.

Of course, it's a lot easier, cheaper and lower RFI simply to use a cable!

Type 31 ferrite pretty much eliminates the problem.

 

QSL World Spam

I'm not impressed at all to recently find at least two e-mail inboxes being flooded with unwanted electronic QSLs from users of QSL World, a service that has appeared from nowhere in recent days.

 

Site as accessed 02 March 2025.

It's clear that QSL World, a site registered in January 2024 and with policies updated in January 2025, is scraping email addresses from QRZ.com callsign entries.

I don't want e-QSLs of any form. My native callsign page on QRZ.com is abundantly clear about that. Nobody will ever get one back. I've never consented to receiving emails from QSL World. It's all mightily irritating.

It seems, for now at least, fairly easy to unsubscribe from the system and I've done exactly that, as well as deleting my e-mail addresses from QRZ.com. Update: unsubscribing does appear to be effective.

As for GDPR and data protection, QSL World has a policy about that. But it's clearly a copy-and-paste job, because the email address to contact about this has the words [Your Contact Email] instead of, er, an e-mail address:

Policy as of 02 March 2025.

Contacting the postman@... address to ask about personal data results in the entirely predictable and despairing auto-reply:

E-mail received 02 March 2025.

QSL World doesn't make it quick to find out who they are. Their 'Contact Informtion' option just takes you back to where you started, revealing nothing. Their domain name registration is private. Only in the Privacy Policy is their address disclosed - it being in... Mexico. An online store is also operated on the same site, though only a clock and t-shirt are offered at the time of writing. It all looks a bit done by a schoolboy sort of site, which only undermines trust in it further.

 

The address is there, but it's not quick to find. The 'merch' part of the site has some Spanish language wording, confirming it's likely Mexican-based. As noted, the indicated e-mail refuses to accept any messages sent to it.

QSL World's address is somewhere around here.

According to the information, personal data is not sold. It's an open question at the moment as to whether QRZ.com is benefiting in any way from operators' data held on their site and where no consent for data scraping has been given. Certainly, third party cookies are set by use of the QSL World site and that, also, is irksome, if not potentially risky. The fact that their e-mail bounces means nobody can reasonably trust this site.

Altogether, a less-than-glowing entry into the ham world.