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Re: [TowerTalk] Good vacation antenna

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Good vacation antenna
From: Steve Harrison <k0xp@k0xp.com>
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2025 09:34:05 -0700
List-post: <mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
On 7/3/2025 7:37 AM, cqtestk4xs--- via TowerTalk wrote:
I'm no longer in a QTH where I can put up a tower, or for that matter, any 
antenna.  So I am planning on doing some operating when we camp out.
I'm looking at a multi-band vertical that can be attached to the tent camper tongue 
framework (temporarily).  I want the antenna to cover 40-10 mtrs, easily set up and 
take dpown and can be collpsed to roughly 6 ft sections.  The old 14 AVQ would be 
pwerfect but is no longer made.
Any ideas?

Yup; when I was living with my ole, doddering father in a gated HOA-ruled community during his last days, I used an old, weakened-by-innumerable shots Wallyworld slingshot to shoot a nearly-invisible 60 or 80 lb fishing line up as high as I could get it into a pine tree. I tied the heaviest teardrop-shaped weight that Wallyworld had on the far end and had to watch to see where the fishing line eventually snaked down through all the pine branches. Sometimes, I could not find the weight; sometimes, it got caught up on a branch. And sometimes, I had to jerk the near end of the fishing line countless times to coax that weight to gradually, slooowwwllyy work its way down to where I could grab it.

That end of the fishing line became the line by which I then pulled up a thin wire (see below) that sloped upward to some extent as high in the tree as I could get it, but was sometimes only 30 - 35 feet long, and sometimes at least 58 feet of wire strung up sloping to the top but vertically through the tree. I reasoned that being nylon fishing line, I did not have to use an insulator 8-)

The ground-near end of the wire was tied to, and terminated at my metallic bedroom window frame, to an ordinary type N (or UHF, I don't remember now) female connector. The shell of the four-screw flange-mount connector was bolted to an aluminum bracket solidly screwed to the metal window frame. Down at the bottom of the frame, I attached more thin wire and ran it to the nearest cold water pipe. I also cut and laid out two counterpoise wires, 34 feet long, running in opposite directions. (The length of these was chosen only for convenience; I really didn't have room to make them any longer).

Then I attached a short length of RG213 or similar cable to the connector, led it into my bedroom and tuned it with an old, decrepit Heathkit SA-2060A tuner (decrepit, because that roller inductor coupling was ALWAYS loosening up since there was no ability for it to wobble back-and-forth freely to accomodate the well-worn plastic roller inductor shell).

I used that antenna from August 2018 until August 2021 and finished working my 5BDXCC with it, in addition to working over 50 countries on 160M, too. I was able to run 700W output from an AL-800, however, which really made a big difference. I usually didn't have to wait long to bust pileups  8-D

I did have to redo the wire antler a few times when something broke or came loose. I used a Robin-blue (to try to camoflage it against the sky) #28 insulated stranded wire (from AllElectronics (back in the days when they were still alive and kicking).

Nobody EVER seemed to notice either the wire, nor my operating with all that power. If anybody ever noticed the fishing line coming out of the tree, they never said anything to me about it. I have no idea whether I ever had any TVI; dad didn't have a TV and neither of us ever listened to any music radio stations.

Of course, I always worked on the wire either in the early morning hours before sunup, or I'd shoot through the tree while hugging the side of the house so nobody would notice me 8-D

So very simple wire antlers can actually work out quite well in temporary accomodations.

Steve, K0XP


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