Above is a rather fine example of letting the smoke out. My last post talked about replacing a dipole that had worked well for many years but suddenly not so much. With the options of breaking it all apart to check the inside pieces, or throwing out the antenna, I chose the former.
What you are looking at is a very cooked load. Originally 9 10k ohm resistors in parallel are now well in truly charred. behind this (as evidenced by red winding wire) is a ferrite rod with a coil wrapped around it, in parallel with the resistor bank. These loads are used to give the antenna its low SWR across all bands.
Cooking the loads occurs when you forget there is a difference between Px and Py power and also forget that most baluns/loads can take a greater amount of the former over the latter. In this case my new radio allowed me to transmit 100 watts of PSK31, when the antenna was only rated for 50 watts.
It’s not out of the realms of possibility to repair this, should the ferrites in the loads and balun still be in working order. However when you take into consideration that I am would probably need to replace most of the stainless steel wire, obtain replacement resistors and still end up with a balun of questionable integrity (due to aforementioned power excesses), it may be time to recover what I can from the antenna and throw out the remains.