After long being tired of the poor performance of my HF9v with 18 radials, I finally sold it off to a fellow ARROW club member for what I had invested (not a lot) and was left with the radial field in the woods (now mostly buried after 3 years). I let it sit for a while, wandering out there every few weeks to prune a few branches and stare at the mast and wires sticking out of the berm between my yard and the freeway. I went by it when I was re-working the big horizontal loop, which broke around Labor Day, and kept thinking of what to do … pull up the radials? That seemed like a shame. Or put them to use them somehow else?
Category: Antennae – Propogation
Spring contest season demanded a new antenna that would handle 160m with some efficiency and compliment my other antennas. I settled on the >1 wavelength horizontal loop for its multi-band potential, relative invisibility, and ease of matching. Anything over a wavelength on 160m (540′ length) would be sufficient, but longer is better, as it lowers radiation angles and improves performance.
Since I reconnected the coax to it, my vertical dipole – a tribander driven element hung from a high tree branch – has still not seemed to work well. I would switch back and forth between it and my 20/40/80 horizontal fan dipole, and the horizontal was always at least an S-unit better. In the WPX SSB contest the vertical dipole was only better when the signal came from directly off the end of the horizontal dipole, and I began to think I had water in the coax.