My colinniars and the Carolina Windom can just be seen at the base of the longest (Tri band) antenna.
Here are my antennas The longest one on the chimney stack is a 3 band antenna covering 2m ,70cm and 6m the shorter vertical is a 2 band antenna that covers 2m and 70cm. The Wire you can see coming from the chimney is my new windom, made for me and fitted by a good friend of mine G4ZTD
Seen here relocating the antennas for me and adding the new antenna.
Kelvin G4ZTD having a coffee break 🙂
I also have a long wire, but this has become very noisy on 40m, 80m and 160m It is caused by some local QRM but have not yet discovered the source.
Since the Windom going up and the Collinear antenna’s being relocated. The long wire antennas has been joined by a half sized g5rv. Which made a difference to 40m, as it became a lot quieter. Although the g5rv seems to only be resonant on 20m.
Kelvin is going on my roof again soon to replace the worn out wrong type of Digital terrestrial TV antenna. I have all the components needed now. But it is when Kelvin is available to do the work.
Portable Antenna’s
A goodly while ago I purchased two fishing pole type antennas from http://www.prowhipantennas.co.uk/
This company no longer appears to be trading though as the picture that were sourced from their site have disappeared and the site is unreachable.
The Delta Loop
The Manufacturer of these antenna’s maked several different types of Antenna’s. I chose 2 of them the first of which was a 4m Delta loop.
The delta loop arrives in a storage tube. However you need a pole to mount the base for the poles. I found the pole is easily held by using one of the alloy stands The original supplier used in effect an decent length of aluminum or maybe aluminum alloy with a point on one end to allow it to be driven into the ground and the antenna is attached to that angle once it has been banged into the ground. In high winds it may not be practical to use one of the stands, but on both occasions that I have erected it it has worked fine.
The 4m one I bought covers 80m to 10m which is all that I need .
We tended to favor this antenna. We had them both up, but this seemed to perform slightly better than the vertical. Though there was not a great deal in it.
Ages ago I bought a bag of reusable cable ties that were really intended for motorcycle wiring looms. I wish I had bought more from Ebay at the time as they do a fantastic job of tidying up the wires for when it comes to packing the antenna’s away again at the end of the day.
The day we used the antenna’s they didn’t really get a fair test as the propagation was not very good. But that was true for both antenna’s
6m Vertical
This is the antenna again I used the reusable cable ties as they came in very handy for tidying up the wires when it came time to pack it all away again.
But the antenna was erected in minutes and indeed taken down in minutes.
The vertical once erected and the counterpoise laid out worked a treat.
So well in fact that when I tried it at home I out of curiosity turned off the auto tuner on my Yaesu FT 990 and it worked on every band without any high swr warnings or shutting down the transmit.0
I thought it must be a fluke but no I tried it with the long wire, the G5RV and the Windom and they all shut down the radio with high swr readings on the bands they are not resonant on.
I am not saying I would run it without the tuner, other than as an experiment, but it is a testimonial to the 6m antenna that it can perform this way. I can’t obviously say whether or not the same is true for the other antenna’s in this range. But this one it is certainly true. However I do think the Yaesu ft990 is a quite forgiving radio.
I bought this antenna earlier in 2014 it is a sota Beams SB270 which is a 2m or 70cm beam I expect both could be used together via a duplexer. I am looking forward to trying it out, but I have not had the opportunity to do so on location yet.
This is a library picture sourced from Sotabeams site for the SB270 antennas. This anntenna is capable of working either as a 2m, or a 7cm beam, in either the horezontal axis or the vertical axis.
I have made several Ladder line J poles and Slim Jim’s and I have to say I think the Slim Jim’s perform much better then the jpoles. I will no longer bother with j poles.
These are lalder line slim jims’s made for 70cm the 2m ones are very similar, just different dimensions.
Reach foir the sky. The tape measure yagis work well on transmit as well as recieve. but they are next to useless in winduy conditions as the elements fold up
Then there are these 2m DF antennas I made. They work well on both receive and transmit, but they do have their limitations.
I have also made several resonant on one band antennas. No antenna is going to be resonant all across a band. so a tuner is still needed, but it doesn’t have to do much work on the resonant band.
I experimented with verticals, but getting a good match without a unun, proved to be more trouble than it was worth. The point was I wanted to avoid matching transformers and the like. Dipoles are easier and I have made 2 x 40m antennas. One for qrp use and one for home.
Home made 40m dipole for home use. The wire winders are from sotabeams and they make lifer a hell of a lot easier.
The 40m antennas will work on 40m – 10m. Though I would say 10m is borderline. So I also made a 20m, 17m, 10m and 6m qrp antennas.
Due to space constrictions I am now thinking in terms of making an experimental fan dipole to cover, 40m, 20m,,17m, 15m, 10m and maybe 6m as well.
20DFJ and myself are working on constructing a mag loop hopefully a portable version. I am also experimenting with resonant wiles for specific bands.
We also have a full sized G5RV under construction. It is very similar in appearance to the 40m dipole shown above, but the wire is in total 104ft long to allow for some adjustment down to 102ft
We recently used a half sized g5RV and got some fairly spectacular results from it.
