Hello towertalk,
After experimenting with various random wires strung around the
apartment and attempting to gain reception off the rain gutter I gave
up and begged my landlord to allow me to use my apartment window and a
tree about 150 ft away for an antenna. He agreed as long as I didn't
break anything. After doing a bit of reading I found that a dipole
would have a serious problem with this arrangement. My transmission
line would be parallel to one of the ends of the dipole as it reentered
my apartment. From what I understand regarding dipoles this is a nono.
I settled on an end fed cut for 80 meters. At first I fed it with 50
ohm coax with the center conductor tied to the end of the antenna and
the braid connected to a handy radiator pipe. Keep in mind at this
point that I'm not transmitting, simply receiving so nothing is really
going out over the air over this antenna. Eventually though I
discovered a large amount of noise coming across this antenna. Because
the last foot of the antenna was intimately involved with the window
frame I assumed that was part of the problem. So I attached an
insulator to the end and let it hang about 4 ft out past the apartments
overhang. When I did this I had to switch feed-lines to 300 ohm TV
line because of umm..budget problems relating to my college tuition and
lack of sufficient coax.
The result is my current configuration. One end of the Zepp is
connected to an insulator hanging about 2 stories above the ground and
the other end is slopping downhill a bit as it heads over to the local
handy dandy tree. I feed this arraignment with 300 ohm TV line over
to my rig where it turns into 50 ohm coax and heads into the tuner.
Because of my location downtown I'm experiencing a ton of noise with
this setup. Most frequencies I listen on have some sort of buzzing and
a few are downright unusable. Would a different feed-line arraignment
or balun alleviate some of this noise? Should I ground the other side
of the feed-line to the radiator pipe in the bedroom?
I'm also worried about the time when I start operating on the air.
Would an antenna setup similar to this result in large amounts of TVI
to my neighbors? I'm afraid I'm already known in the complex as "that
weird electronics guy" so I can just imagine the mad pitchfork trample
to my door once I get on the air with any level of power.
Because the graph paper was out doing some math homework I drew up a
quick drawing of my "situation". It can be viewed over at
http://zorton.org/radio-nut/qth.jpg if so inclined.
Thanks and 73,
Justin KL1RL
Fairbanks AK
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