Bill, now you have it right.
I was going to suggest you swap the AH-3 for an AH-4 and place it outdoors,
but if you can place the AH-3 outdoors and keep it water-proof, then that
should be just fine.
You can worry about theory and calculate the impedance "band by band" and
then selectively exchange the 1:1 for a 1:4 balun, or, simply do what was
suggested and make yourself a coax balun wrapped around PVC pipe. Bob,
K4TAX, has instructions for building one.
Finally, having used that antenna many times in many locations over the past
25 years, I actually had two occasions when one of my four corners fell
down. The first time was on a DX-Pedition to Andorra (C31SE) in 1979 where
a violent storm blew one corner of the antenna out of the tree. The second
time was a field day operation in southern Germany where, again in rain, one
of our 4 poles fell down about an hour before the end of the contest and
nobody volunteered to go out and put it back up.
In both cases, I just kept operating and did not notice any difference. Of
course there would be a difference of some bands and in some directions but
fundamentally the antenna just kept working well enough to keep making QSOs
at a rapid rate.
With the antenna in Andorra up just 25', I worked about 25 stateside
stations each morning on 80m cw, and on 40m cw I could work stateside all
night long, so yes, in theory it's a cloud burner, but it still works
excellent for DX on all but the lowest band (1 wavelength), and there it
works "OK" for DX. (By the way, the Rig used in Andorra was the very first
Ten-Tec Omni sold to Europe, running at just 50w output power to save
battery).
73
Rick
DJ0IP
-----Original Message-----
From: tentec-bounces@contesting.com [mailto:tentec-bounces@contesting.com]
On Behalf Of William
Sent: Wednesday, February 01, 2006 7:33 PM
To: tentec@contesting.com
Subject: [TenTec] Loop/open wire/AH3
I neglected to mention that I intend to mount the AH3 outdoors so the coax
leading to the Argonaut will only be about 8 feet long. I could end up
having more coax coiled into a balun arrangement than the total feedline
length. The open wire portion won't be very long either so what I lack in
height will be compensated somewhat by lower losses---I hope.
It will be a skewed loop since I can only get up three of the trees so the
NW corner will be the lowest point. It will be interesting to see how it
works. Now if my Argonaut would only get back from Ten Tec as it is almost
one month since it arrived there.
Bill
Rigless in B.C.
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