[RSM] Coax, coax, coax

[Kelly Taylor]

Hi David,

My experience suggests you will get the best success using coax to every degree possible, especially for insertion into the shack. I tried, in the early days at this QTH, a dipole fed with twinlead. It got out OK but reception was a disaster. The feedline picked up every bit of noise it encountered on the way in.

I have a Carolina Windom up at the lake, about 31 feet at its highest: a 130-foot leg in one direction and a 65 foot leg in the other (IIRC). It seems to work well. It has a balun at the feedpoint and a choke 21 feet down the feedline. The design essentially forces some common-mode radiation from the 21-foot length, and it seems to play as much like a top-fed vertical as it does a horizontal dipole.

It’s not a terrible compromise for all-band work, but it is a compromise. Resonant, single-band antennas, even if merged such as your fan dipole idea, I think, are always better. 

My experience at the cottage, having tried delta loops and vertical yagis, suggests that height is a far more important consideration than gain: for instance, my 20m inverted-vee dipole, with the apex at the same height as the top of the former delta loop that replaced it (meaning, of course, that all of the delta loop was below that point), worked better than anything else I tried.

73, kelly, ve4xt