Diamond are a great company for producing products ideal for Ham radio enthusiasts. When I say "great", I mean great value for money. Their triplexer is one of those products.
For around 70€, this product splits out three amateur radio bands, 1.6 to160 MHz, 350-500 MHz and 850 to 1300 MHz into one UHF jack. This allows three antennas to share one cable into the shack.
The owner brought this one in, saying that 23cm showed an off the scale SWR and asked me to take a look at it. So the case was opened.
From top to bottom, we see the filter stages for low to high bands, with 23cm being at the bottom. I have outlined a circle in red at the bottom right of the image above. It shows one coil very close to the stand off, that is used to mount the base plate. When I opened it, this coil was touching the brass stand off and thus shorting the signal to ground. I very gently pried the coil away from the stand off and then hooked the triplexer up to my tracking generator. A sweep of all bands showed that the triplexer was back up and working on all bands.
It's a pity that something this simple caused the triplexer to fail.
The owner was back on the air again and a happy camper. Job done!
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