We'll be having The Clan and The Little Ones tomorrow for Easter, so probably no blogging until late Sunday night.
Since a Golden Rule of antennas is to Get Them As High As You Can, I spent some time today adding another section of mast, and sliding the balun assembly up towards the top of the mast, eliminating most of the downlead from the wire to the balun. This raised the feedpoint (where the antenna starts) from about 6', up to about 14'. When the new post gets planted, I'll move these three sections of mast to the new pole, raising the top of the mast to about 20'.
I don't know if eliminating ~3' of downlead does much, but it lets me get almost all of the wire stretched out in a straight line.
And I even ran the counterpoise radials straighter this time.
By the time the "final" version of this gets on-the-air, I should be quite good at it!
This today's plot:
And this is before I raised the feedpoint:
And I ordered some slide together aluminum tubing and a mount from DX Engineering. I'll be building a 'permanent' version of the 20 Meter vertical to mount to the fence, so I can clean up and stow my BuddiStick and tripod back in their bags.
Hope you all have a very happy and Blessed Easter!
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Looking at the two plots, it seems like you changed things (because every change changes things) but not much. I guess if the tuner's happy, you're happy?
ReplyDeleteHappy Easter to you and yours!
Happy Easter to you, too, SiG!
DeleteYeah, I've got to step back and scratch the cranium for a bit. This will all be moot after I get the final version up with the SGC at the feed, but it's fun to experiment and try to understand what's going on.