Towertalk
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [TowerTalk] OCFD: Should I be able to do better?

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] OCFD: Should I be able to do better?
From: "Lux, Jim" <jim@luxfamily.com>
Date: Thu, 27 May 2021 10:48:51 -0700
List-post: <mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
On 5/27/21 9:30 AM, Kevin Zembower via TowerTalk wrote:
Hello, all,

I'm trying to build my first Off-Center Fed Dipole for 40-10M. I'm
following the directions at

If you're looking for multiband, then a "fan dipole" is probably a better bet - it's symmetrical, just needs a choke at the feed, etc.

The basic design is a 40m dipole, a 20m dipole, and a 10m dipole in parallel, with 6-12" between the wires. (Commercial product is something like an Alpha-Delta DX-CC).  the 40m will also resonate on 15m.  Adjustment is a bit fiddly, because there is interaction among the dipoles.  What I do is "get it close" and then use an autotuner - the mismatch if it's slightly off resonance isn't huge, so the loss in your transmission line won't be huge.

Rig up a choke with a couple 31 mix 2.4" cores per Jim's choke cookbook. A single choke will have trouble covering the whole 2 octave band, although give it a shot, it could work ok - I have a box of cores, so I just do more chokes because it's easy.

Easy to build. Works great as an inverted V on a single support.


If you don't have a tuner, make sure your support is on a pulley you can hoist and lower.  Get your measuring tool of choice out, cut the wires a bit long, and do the "fold back or crumple" the wires to shorten it iteratively until it matches where you need it to match.   With something like a NanoVNA it's easy to see where the resonances are (although you can't get the whole 5-30 MHz band at sufficient resolution with the NanoVNA 100 points) and a few tries will tell you how much crumpling you need to do.  There is a *lot* of interaction between the wires.



_______________________________________________



_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk
<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>