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At present I'm mainly active on the lower HF bands (160,80,40,30). I use two ground mounted vertical antennas on 40 metres. Each one has 64 quarter wavelength radials on the ground and it seems to me like it's a reasonably efficient array as I've been able to work some great DX with modest transmitter power. On 160 metres I use a 165' end-fed wire antenna around 50' high. The wire is fed via a home made coupler. I've found this arrangement to work well for east coast VK contacts, both day and night. Please read this interesting article on HF vertical antennas I have recently erected a wire dipole of 135' in length and approximately 50' high at the feed point. This antenna is centre fed with a balanced plastic coated feed line and tuned via a coupler in the shack. Because of the relatively low height, I've found this antenna to be quite useful for night time propagation and gives very good results around the east coast of VK. It's also a good performer on 40 metres during the day for VK contacts. I have two tower projects on the go. These will support 'beam' antennas for both VHF and HF as well as some more wires.
In early 2008 I installed a six metre vertical and a VHF/UHF discone antenna on the roof of the house. The mount was originally installed to take a two-way satellite dish which gave us internet access. This system became obsolete when the phone company upgraded the phone lines to fibre and we swung over to ADSL. 2.5 metres of aluminium tubing and a cross arm were added to the original mount to gain some height. At the same time I devised a window cable entry for 1/2" co-ax cables. A plunge router was used to shape a piece of timber to form a weatherproof fit into a sliding window located at one end of the shack. An aluminium plate which will hold the cable glands was then fitted to the upper half of the timber. A coat of matching black paint was then applied to finish it off. For security purposes, the window slide is locked up against the side of the timber insert as shown in the third photo.
This page last edited on Thursday, 08 May 2008 |
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