On Sun, 06 Nov 2005 21:16:33 GMT, Ron Hardin
wrote:

I just had a second failure (of 6 DA100E's owned for I guess 6 years,
so that's 18 years per DA100E average so far)

The first one went to 100% thermal noise

The second one went to what sounded like an intermittent short
in the coax, blowing my 1/4a fast-blow fuse every few hours as well
(which protects its internal 1/3a fast-blow fuse). It's in
the antenna's 50' lead if it's in the coax, and there's no obvious
place that that might happen, so it's probably not the coax.

Anyway I dug out my spare DA100E, measured the distance to the
connector against the ground, located the existing wire with
an AM radio tuned to null a weakish station (dragged across the ground
until the station popped up) and dug right within 2" of the existing
connector.

The replacement works great, very quiet. I guess it had been making
some noise for a while and I didn't notice consciously.

My DA100D has been running since '88, nary a prob.

bob
k5qwg