I accidently put up a fairly directional 80 meter antenna.
ALL contacts were to the East and North. I heard NOTHING either South or West
of me. Has some gain (heard stuff on it that I could not hear on the
vertical, stations heard were a few S units better on the new antenna too). I
could hear stations West and South of me on the vertical, but absolutely zip
on the new antenna.
Here's what I did:
I put up an 80 meter dipole (65' of #10 insulated, stranded wire per leg)
with a choke made up of 8 turns of 25' of RG-213 at the feed point. The feed
point is at 52 feet (in one of those darned trees). The South end is up about
50 feet. The North end goes about 40 feet to around 45 feet high and the
angles to the NW ending up at about 30 or so feet high at the end.
I put this up Saturday morning and was quite sick to boot (If I wasn't
feeling so bad this would have been just another dipole). After climbing 50
feet into a tree I didn't feel too great and instead of making up a proper
length of coax for the feed I grabbed a length of RG-213 that "looked" long
enough - It wasn't. To get the coax back to the shack instead of running it
straight down I had to angle it to the East. It goes from 51 feet (the end of
the choke) to a wood porch column on my house which is about 20 feet East of
the feed point and about 5 feet off the ground. The coax goes from that point
straight down to the ground and then another 35 or so feet East to the
shack.
Because of the choke I was surprised that it works like it does.
I suspect that this has been observed before, but it sure fooled me!
Now to run another feeder to get me an 80m antenna that I can switch
directions on.
Cool!
If any of y'all has done this before I'd sure appreciate hearing the best
angles for the feedline, etc., to use. No use in reinventing the wheel.
73,
Don - K4BEV
--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
multipart/alternative
text/plain (text body -- kept)
text/html
---
|