First, thanks to Mike W0BTU for directing me to this forum. Last year was just
my second attempt to work the CQWW and I guess I did fairly good for a
newbie...Single Op Low Power, 1st in Florida, 2nd in Call area 4, 7th in US and
11th in North America.
BUT only worked a handful of DX out of Europe. The few I did work asked me why
I wasn't answering all the stations they could hear calling me. The vertical
tower I used the last two years gets out great, but doesn't hear as well.
I only operate from sunset to sunrise in this contest because I am using the
466 ft tower at the radio station where I work. Daytime there the tower is hot
with about 10 amps of RF from our 3.1kw AM daytimer. There is 100kw FM out of
a 10bay ERI dual polarized stack at the top of the tower. I do suspect the FM
causes some suppression of signals on my rcvr because when the FM signs off at
midnight, I do get better contact numbers per hour.
I get great signal reports from almost everyone I've worked on this BIG STICK.
I just pull the knife blade from the AM ATU and connect with a coax balun
directly to the station ground system and the copper strap to the tower. It's
36' wide on each side. LOTS OF STEEL up there. loads up great with very low
swr. Especially up near 1.9
This year I just got a chain link fence finished around the entire 5 acres. SO
I considered putting up a loop for receive. It would be a total of 2050 feet.
Would take about 300 feet of coax to center feed it at the back of the
property. I calculated the cost of building around 100 2x2 A Frames to get the
loop up about 30 feet, and would tie wrap the A frames to the fence posts...
the lumber and hardware alone would be over a grand! and that does not include
the cost of coax and the 2050 feet of wire!
I've read a lot of the articles on the Beverage including the ones from the
20's... and after reading Mike's info and at his suggestion I looked up the
archives on Beverages here on the forum. Looks like running a Beverage
across the 250 ft wide ground system for the AM would not be a good idea?
Course I would have an excellent ground source at the SW end of the Beverage
and could easily have a full wave aimed NE at
Europe.
Another thought would be to hang a fullwave extended Zep(fed with ladder line)
from the station tower. I can climb the tower and hang a pulley at any height
I want. Then I could pull the Zep up late in the afternoon. I might even be
able to leave it up after trying it out a weekend before. The lower end would
go to a 40 ft push up mast at the NE corner of the chain link fence.
One of my ham club friends plotted the loop with EZNEC...and is going to run
plots of 4 different configurations of the Zep..(based on different positions
up the tower from 100' to 250'.
SO SUGGESTIONS ANYONE?
Thanks
Cal Zethmayr
W4GMH
Crestview, FL.
W4GMH at cox.net if you want to contact me off the list. I can send you some
google earth pix of the layout.
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UR RST IS ... ... ..9 QSB QSB - hw? BK
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