> Tom, sometimes I wonder why you bother to buy anything.
You seem to
> end up rebuilding it better then you can
> purchase new ;-)
I'm a stupid impulsive buyer who unfortunately is just smart
enough to know when I've bought bad engineering.
> I've got two of those Telrex baluns (NIB). Don't intent
to use them but
> they are in a way artifacts of the olden days of
> ham radio. Despite all the rhetoric the Telrex beams
served many a US
> Embassy very well, for many many years.
I'm not sure how good an endorsement it is when our
government buys something. The military loves B&W dipoles
and those Max-Con resistor loads that are sold as "solid
state tuners". -10dB is nothing compared to a good SWR when
you are on a clear channel.
I've heard Telrex made some good antennas, but the 3 ele 40
I had was garbage (as was the balun). After looking at the
40 and buying it based on how great it was, I really have to
question how accurate claims are about other Telrex
antennas.
The balun was a few turns of large coax with a parallel
winding of house wire to form a crude air-core voltage
balun. The winding inductance was far too low to make a good
15 meter balun, let alone a useful 40M balun. Telrex
partially compensated for the crappy balun by mismatching
the driven element, so the user operated blissfully with a
good match while current in each side of the hairpin was
unbalanced by a considerable amount.
I'm sure the aluminum tubing would have made a great 20M
Yagi. It just was far too thin to make a good 40M element.
IMO all this nostalgia about the "good old days" is like
swooning over a 66 Mustang K code GT. Old stuff may bring
back fond memories, but performance in general really
sucked compared to similar modern products. I like old stuff
because of the memories of how I THOUGHT it worked, not
because of how it ACTUALLY worked.
73 Tom
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