There's days and days, right!.  Today was one of them *sigh*.

Decided to see if I could shorten the Sirio 11 metre dipole to enable use of my 10 metre Anytone rig.  Bit of a workup this as I had to keep climbing the ladder to swing the thing in situ vertically one way then the next so the 2 outer elements in turn were at the bottom for removal/ reinsertion after being increasingly shortened.  Each time I then had to return to the shack to check the swr.  All the while it insisted on raining of course.

After about an hour of this, which included fiddling about with the gamma match, I came to the conclusion that I was never going to get the thing lower that 3 to 1.  In the end I gave up and decided to try my tuner. Something I dont like doing, as naturally the antenna remains untuned.

Anyway, during the tuning process I noticed the computer had frozen.  No mouse curser.  Couldn't restart normally of course so reduced to hard shut down.  Having restarted successfully I fired up mmsstv and noticed there was no audio registering on the program.  Winding the radio output up increased the computer speaker output ok.   Mmmmm, odd!.

Tried other sound card programs  with similar results.  Oh flip!, I said.... Honest!

I reinstalled the usb card driver with no effect, then took the computer back a couple of restore points.  Still no good. Opening the sound card sofware showed no imput level, though sound was obviously going through the computer.  Weird!

Oh no!, surely I'm not going to have to reinstall windows, due to corruption somewhere!.  Maybe there's a repair option on the disc.  Hang on, just thought of something.  Brian, try changing the usb card (onboard card has been u/s for years).  You have a spare somewhere in the shed.  Good idea.  Rummage rummage, there you are my little beauty.  Now please do the business baby, I don't fancy all that reinstall hassle.

Well I'll go to the foot of our stairs!.  It worked.  It was the usb sound card. How 12 watts of stray rf in the shack managed to screw it up, goodness knows, but we're back in business.  I'll do without 10 fm from now on thank you very much.