[CQ-Contest] Re: awsome upgrades to the 8 band vertical

[sawyered at earthlink.net]

Steve,  Great to hear that you are upgrading your station.  As a competitive Low Power contester using less than a 50 foot tower, I would like to offer a couple of suggestions:

- For 40 meters, I would cut the dipole at the center of the band.  You should get fine full band performance if you use heavy gauge wire like 12 or 10 AWG.
- For 80 Meters, I would use W9WI's suggestion of ropes that are easily accessible to clip in and out a CW wire leg.  I would tune the CW assembly for 3550 and SSB for 3800.  You don't want to sacrifice mismatch loss at the antenna on 80, especially with a low dipole.

Are you interested in developing the station into a competitive SO2R setup some day for DX contests?  If so, consider that you may want to change that tribander now or later to a C31XR with individual feeds for each band.  You could always mount the A3 at 30ft to the south later.  I would be very prudent in adding LOTS of 160 radials from the base of the tower to make the antenna you are referring to effecient on 160M.

Finally, consider what other resources in the way of trees, you may have on your lot.  I have a phased dipole array on 40M at 50ft into EU which is suspended between 2 trees which gives nice gain into EU (around 3dB over a single dipole which isn't bad when you consider that the typical "shorty 40" beam is 4.2dBd).  You may also want to consider something with vertical polarization on 80M.  An inverted L with a 5/8 wave radiator is what I use here.  Why?  It minimizes ground losses with a higher feedpoint impeadance (I still have 8 elevated radials).  I feed it with 450 Ohm ladder line to a tuner in the shack (solves the CW/SSB problem).

Good luck and feel free to keep asking great questions.

73,

Ed  N1UR  (NV1N in WPX)