John,
My current plan is to build a vertical that can collapse into short
sections. It is a design by Phil Salas - AD5X and uses a 10 ft
telescoping whip at the top and covers 60-10 meters, without a tuner. I
have had good luck with verticals and even though this is a 1/4, with
some radials I think I will be in good shape I placed the address of
the article at the bottom of this note if you are curious.
Also planned is the acquisition of a light sealed battery probably about
7 ah. The Argosy can run from 5-50 watts so it gives me some play
room. And hopefully my choice of battery size will not be too limiting.
John / WA1JG
http://www.ad5x.com/images/Articles/VerticalRevH.pdf
On 4/3/2012 4:49 PM, John Peters wrote:
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 28, 2012, at 5:21 AM, "Rick - DJ0IP / NJ0IP"<Rick@DJ0IP.de> wrote:
John,
The lynchpin to having a good signal when operating low power portable, is a
good antenna.
Some people take a great rig, run it at reduced power on a crappy antenna
(i.e., mobil whip mounted to a ground stake), and wonder why they don't work
anybody.
Wire can be a wonderful antenna, but you have to get it up high in the air.
That's why I always took a telescoping fiberglass pole with me.
In the early days they were just 8m long.
Later there were some purpose-built poles for ham radio that were 10m long.
Today you can get them in even stronger quality in lengths of 12m or 18m.
In fact they even come as long as 26m but that's a bit overkill for a
one-man expedition.
For Field Day I always ran a doublet, with each leg 13m long, and fed with
300 Ohm Openwire.
I had a tiny little MFJ Matchbox (T-filter), with a built in Balun.
The Balun was great for 5w QRP or 20w, etc., but I burned it up running
100w.
Had to re-build it, then never tried 100w with it again.
For my normal excursions I had a special lightweight 3-band dipole:
- made of thin Teflon-insulated stranded copper wire (I guess about AWG 22
or so)
- cut for 20m, insulator, more wire for 40m
- 2x short jumpers for jumping the insulator between 20m and 40m segments,
for 40m operation
- 2x short stubs with alligator clips to extend the antenna for 15m
operation (6 inches on each end)
- fed with about 50' of RG-174 (YES, THE THIN STUFF).
- A ball of twine for tying off the ends
Twine was cheap and disposable if it got too tangled. Ends tied off to
trees, or if nothing else, simply to stakes in the ground.
The thin RG-174 is sufficient and loss is really not bad for short runs at
those frequencies. The loss is worse if you use heavier coax, and then fail
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