Yesterday, I got the ladder out of the garage and connected the ends of my suspect feedline to my NanoVNA, and observed that there were many, many fine dB of loss on this 20 or so feet of LMR-400. A quick check with an ohmmeter showed that the braid was shorted to the center conductor. Well, that's not good! So, I cut one end off and observed that when I put that one on, I didn't get the center conductor all the way in to the connector. Now that that's fixed and the SWRs are reasonable, communications has been achieved. Last night, I made and FT8 contact with KC0HN in Lincoln, NE using the Alpha antenna and my Hermes Lite 2.
More to come