Since I only started in ham radio recently, and I haven’t gotten a permanent antenna setup yet, I’ve been running with a 10 meter vertical sitting in my front yard on a “magic carpet”, also known as a screen door screen. Fancy, isn’t it?

I put it out there quickly before we had a bunch of snow so I could at least play on the radio during the inclement weather. Much to my surprise it was worked wonderfully. I’ve gotten to do FT-8, a little JS8Call, had voice calls with Europe, and sent emails with winlink. It has really far outperformed my expectations.

This week is the first time I’ve been able to even see the screen, it has been covered in snow for weeks. It’s finally warming up a little and everything is melting, though it did freeze overnight.

And that’s where today’s troubleshooting began. I noticed my SWR was up over 2 (usually less than 1.5) on 10m. I spent quite a bit of time outside with the NanoVNA trying to figure out what changed – and every time I tried something, it just got worse.

I noticed there were frozen water droplets all over the screen, could that be what’s wrong? I set the screen out in the sun for an hour and let it all melt. After putting things back into place (actually a better location so the coax isn’t crossing our walkway), I’m happy to report an SWR of 1.1 right at 28.5Mhz!