Different people have differing views on the definition of a serious antenna.
An 8 circle with 8 directions of BSEF verticals would definitely be serious.
If you wanted one tower and didn’t want to do the work to install a minimum of
100 radials or more I would consider one tall tower with elevated radials. The
best antenna I ever had in Arkansas was 192 feet of 25G which I put up in 1980.
This tower was shunt fed with the feed point at 60 feet and had 9 radials (3
per leg) taking up several acres with the ends pretty high.
Nobody had a four square back then so competition was not as great, but it was
a great performer. I think it was better than most serious antennas at the
time which would be quarter wave verticals with extensive, on ground, radial
systems.
That antenna for transmit and a half dozen thousand foot Beverages would be a
serious 160m setup even today.
73… Stan, K5GO
Sent from my iPhone
> On Mar 24, 2022, at 10:34 AM, w5zn@w5zn.org wrote:
>
> Hi Dino,
>
> I started with a single 1/4 wave vertical as Tree notes and it worked
> extremely well for years, however after a period of time I had a desire to
> upgrade the single vertical to a system that offered some gain on TX. I came
> across the array that Tim, K3LR, mentioned in "Low Band DX'ing" that
> describes his systems and discovered I could build this array around the
> existing 1/4 wave vertical and achieve 4-square performance in a smaller
> footprint area. I have now used the array for four years and the performance
> has been outstanding. After reading the info regarding this array in Low Band
> DX'ing I documented some additional details of my experience that were
> presented at the Dayton Antenna Forum and also published in the National
> Contest Journal. Copies of those documents can be found here:
>
> https://www.kkn.net/dayton2018/2018_Dayton_Antenna_Forum-160_meter_TX_Array.pdf
>
> https://ncjweb.com/features/sepoct18feat.pdf
>
> As Tree notes, the very first step is to determine exactly what your
> objective is. The five element parasitic array has met my objectives for both
> contest and DX activities.
>
> 73 Joel W5ZN
>
>
>> On 2022-03-23 22:38, Dino Darling wrote:
>> If you may and you are willing to indulge me; if you were about to buy
>> 5-acres with no neighbors or restrictions and wanted to erect a
>> serious 160M antenna system, what would you build and why? We can pass
>> on the Radio Arcala discussion; nobody's that cool.
>> A loaded 4-square? 1/4 wave stick (or longer)? Phased dipoles? (fill
>> in the blank)?
>> I've seen a 200' tower with three phased dipoles tilted on end. The
>> end of one side of the dipole was anchored and insulated at the top of
>> the tower and came down like guy cables. About half way down was the
>> feedpoint, were an isolated anchor cable continued down the same path
>> to ground (like a guy cable). However, the second half of the dipole
>> was pulled back to the base of the tower, from the center feedpoint
>> insulator. It looked like an arrowboard chevron or a regular dipole
>> that was turned 90 degrees on its side. The coax was horizontal back
>> to the tower. There were three of these spaced 120 degrees apart and
>> fed with a phasing network to steer it. I understand it works great.
>> So what would you build?
>> Dino - KX6D
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