As a Novice in 1974 I spent three weeks in a travel trailer with a
stainless steal roof testing antennas. I was primarily interested in CW
on 80 and 40 meters, but also used 15 and 10 meters for daily contact
with various slowspeed CW nets. I was mostly interested in contacts
from western New York state to Oklahoma.
I put up a fan dipole at 30 feet as a primary and reference antenna and
than started experimenting with a based loaded vertical for the
trailer. I started with the vertical mounted in water pipe in the yard,
to a mount on the tongue of the trailer and then the side of the
trailer. In all cases the fan dipole was two to four S units stronger
than the vertical.
Than, I had a metal plate with a flange fabricated that allowed me to
mount the vertical in the center of the trailer's metal roof. From that
mounting point, having a vertical elevated with a good elevated ground
became the best solution, beating the reference fan dipole by two and
three S units. In some cases, especially on 40 meters, the vertical was
at 59 + 10 db, while the fan dipole was at S6 to S7. I was quite
surprised by the difference.
During the testing, because of changing noise floor, and desire to think
I was making improvements, I found it easy to think the vertical was
better on the tongue of the trailer and side of the trailer, until I
compared it to the fan dipole. Lesson learned, maintain a reference
antenna - event a tuner fed long wire. It will allow you to have a
backup antenna, and it will help you make better decisions about changes
to your antenna system.
Terry - W6LMJ
On 11/13/13, 9:12 PM, towertalk-request@contesting.com wrote:
Message: 2
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 19:51:01 -0400
From: "Mike & Coreen Smith VE9AA"<ve9aa@nbnet.nb.ca>
To:<towertalk@contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] HF2V Elevated or On Ground
Message-ID:<000001cee0cb$353ac530$9fb04f90$@nbnet.nb.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
James,
I recently installed an HF9V at around 8' AGL. I use 2 elevated
"ground"(counterpoise) radials per band, sloping from 8' down to about 5'
AGL.
I find it works VERY well on 40m and up and adequate on 80m.
Over the past month, I've compared it to a host of other wire antennas at
similar heights and always found the Butternut to be as good or better
than anything else in the yard here. I believe the raised radials have less
loss, but it was twitchy to tune. An HF2V ought to be a cake-walk to tune.
It's just my opinion that using only a few ground radials is lossy and
that's why everyone preaches ground mounting it. (a lot easier to tune w/
better/wide 2:1 SWR curves) (I use the term "better", but I don't really
mean better, but it is better for the match, but I think it's like dumping
power into the ground to heat worms.)
So far I have around 2500 Q's with it, contesting every weekend and I am
sure it works well , raised up like it is.
p.s.- subscribe to the Yahoo group for Butternut antennas and then check the
files section for "VE9AA" or "AD5X".a couple good ideas
how to get the whole 80m band out of the antenna.
YMMV,
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