Sunday, April 8, 2012

Simple, Expedient HF Antennas

Don't worry, I'm still working on the series of articles I promised, oh, a year ago?
I've rewritten it several times, and it's 90% to the point of adding the illustrations to it.
I'll probably take photos of the various types as I build them out in the back yard, as I don't draw things "on the computer" very well, and I don't want to swipe random pix off the Web.
When this is finished, I'll post the sections of it, and if I can find a free place to upload a pdf for free access, I'll do that, too.
So hang in there, it's "In Work" as we used to say at Boeing!

4 comments:

  1. LOL, I know ALL about field expedient HF antennas... :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, I do, too!
    ;-)
    These will be easy-to-build and deploy ones that you can make out of "whatever" you have laying around.
    I've made both dipole and vertical antennas from scraps of extension cords that I dug out of the trash. Just about any copper wire will do.
    Someday I'll write up something about the time a buddy of mine and I literally loaded up a wet string on 14MHz.
    It was wetted with salt water, but still, it was a "wet string"!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Are you willing to put up with an autotuner? LDG and MFJ produce cheap, effective tuners that make this much less difficult. I have an off-center fed dipole, cut for 40m, that tunes from 40 to 6m with the common (3:1 limit) tuners built in to radios (and my Icoms have always worked well beyond the stated 3:1 limits). I took an 18 MHz dipole on a trip a while back. Tuned all HF bands, with and LDG autotuner, with varying degrees of effectiveness.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I *have* an autocoupler at the base of my vertical.
    More here: http://every-blade-of-grass.blogspot.com/2009/11/hf-vertical-installation.html

    ReplyDelete

Keep it civil, please....

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