Agreed on all points, Jerry ! Definitely pushes the tuner to
its limits. I never work top band with high power... I cannot imagine
how little power is actually radiating outward when I work 160 on
my big stick !
I think antenna vendors should admit these big sticks don't work on 160
- and only marginally well on 80 meters, and then ONLY WITH A LOT OF
HELP - like a big tuner, PLUS loading up the feed line as
DX-Engineering suggests, adding at least 50 feet of wire off the top,
a substantial matching unit at the bottom, and THE BIGGEST COAX you
can afford, and especially with a lot of luck. I tested mine with
RG-8x, RG-8U, and LMR-400-DB. It made a huge difference, and I
figure it would work even better with HARD LINE !
I think the fact they work on 160 is purely a bonus. Using low power,
it does get me into a couple of fairly local rag chew nets with some
guys I do some contesting with, and that is enough for me. Our bunch
uses a huge tower for 160 meter contesting and THAT works much better.
======================== James - K8JHR ======================
On 8/15/2010 10:02 PM, Dr. Gerald N. Johnson wrote:
Fundamentally the 43 foot
> vertical is way too short for 160 and needs a BIG loading coil
> containing about 77 feet of wire, and forcing that to be done in the
> tuner will tend to smoke the tuner. There are other solutions, but the
> long coax or the series loading coil at the pole base should be the
> simplest solutions.
> Its tuner abuse.
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