I use a direct bury rated LMR-400 knock-off that I bought off Ebay. Of course, I do bury it inside PVC pipe out of rodent paranoia :) The particular one I got cost me $200 for a 500' spool and has co
It's your money :) FWIW, Jefatech is not some fly by night Chinese company, they're a company from Maryland who mostly sell into the wifi market. I've been quite happy with their LMR-400 equivalent.
At the feed point, one can mount something like an LDG auto-tuner. Those devices can handle a pretty high SWR and will probably allow you to run the above antenna on all the bands 80 and up. In a 40x
Nothing wrong with having cheap "spark gap" connectors at the tower. Worst case they don't do nothing, best case they short some of the largest lightning induced pulses out before they reach your (mo
Not to mention he could fall on the guy who was climbing below him. Endangering yourself is one thing, endangering your colleague is just unacceptable. -- All rights reversed. _______________________
Have you considered N6LF's vertical H? http://surriel.com/radio/more-small-160-meter-antennas -- All rights reversed. _______________________________________________ _________________________________
Not too long, since I just have an 80m loop here. However, I did get it covered with about 1/2" of ice and snow, several times. I do leave the wire (I use aluminum electric fence wire) loose in the i
I leave enough slack in my antenna, and use flexible tree branches, that snow and ice get shaken off by the wind. Of course, the antenna still seems to work fine when it's covered in snow and ice :)
However, due to the skin effect at radio frequencies, copper clad aluminum is just fine for radio use. The material in the middle of the wire doesn't see any RF, anyway. -- All rights reversed. _____
The easiest way may just be to use N connectors, which are waterproof. -- All rights reversed. _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ TowerTal
A 5:1 mismatch can be entirely reasonable depending on the band, the antenna, etc... For example on 160m and 80m it is common to have high impedances at the band edges, because these bands are just s
Go to the URL below, then type in the numbers: 0.17 dB matched loss 0.26 dB SWR loss 0.43 dB total loss That is 100' of LMR-400 at 2 MHz with a 5:1 SWR. Just how much trouble should one go through to
The big horizontal loop antenna seems decent, provided it is cut at a length that gives it a good match on not just the primary band but also the others: http://surriel.com/radio/multi-band-hf-loop-a
Definitely agreed there. On 15 and up the nulls are often noticable. On 20 and 17, the lobes are still very broad and the nulls are very narrow, but I do suspect a null on 20 towards Antarctica and a
I guess it was early - that point escaped me :) Now, does 24 +j60 count as a high or a low Z, compared to 50 ohm coax? The total magnitude on the smith chart is larger than 50 ohms, but the resistive
After some searching around the web, I found an online transmission line calculator that does take these things into account: http://www.stroobandt.com/antennas/tl-calculator.html It does indeed give
Have you considered a bruce array? You seem to be wanting low cost and a fixed direction, so a two or three element bruce array may do the trick for you. A two element bruce array contains a full wav
I have a crazy idea for a compact 160/80/60 antenna that works reasonably well even over poor ground and has gain on 80 and 60. The idea is to have a 160m double L (aka lazy U) antenna, which also ac
I've gotten NEC to blow up in so many ways using perfectly reasonable wire antenna designs, it's hard to even begin guessing which of the many ways NEC can blow up Chip ran into... Even a simple doub
There are good examples of antennas that work well on two bands without a trap. For example, the 2m / 70cm verticals, which are a little short to be 1/4 wave verticals on 2m (the coil acts as a loadi