Wednesday, July 19, 2017

I have a new antenna

I have a new antenna and it is working very well. It is in the shape of a dipole (kind of) the center is about 18 ft high the two ends are 16 ft. The overall length is 135 ft. It is fed with 300 ohm 94 ft of parallel feedline. From there it goes into a 1 to 1 balun coil, then 25 ft. RG8 coax to the tuner. It compares to my full wave delta loop on 75 meters. With the Palstar tunner it is usable on all bands 75 through 10 meters. It is much better on 30 meters than my 1/4 wave ground mounted 30 meter vertical. It works North and South stations as well as my Phased verticals on 40 meters. With the new mode of FT8 in the last 2 days I have worked about 3/4 of the United States and Canada. Several stations in South America and Europe have been contacted. All with 25 watts or less. The only improvement I could make to the antenna would be change the feedline to 600 ohm, but that won't come for some time because I do not have any and to buy new will be about $75.00 I just wish I could put it up higher as I'm sure it would work even better. Here is a drawing of the antenna.