TopBand: Umbrella Antenna

[John Kaufmann]

K0HA posted an inquiry about slant wire parasitic directional 
vertical arrays.  The ARRL Antenna Compendium, Vol 4.,  has 
an article by KB8I on this concept.  Also the May 1997 issue 
of QST has a followup article by KB8I on this antenna in the 
Technical Correspondence section.  The bottom line is an 
easy way to add gain to an existing tower vertical installation 
with simple wires. 

K1VR and I have another variant on this idea, which  I call a 
"poor man's 4-square".   By hanging some  wires carefully 
tuned to function as parasitic elements from the tower, one 
can obtain a compact 4-direction switchable array with nearly 
the same gain as the 4-square but taking up much less space.  
If you have a single tower and enough space to hang a 160 
dipole, you can fit one of these arrays.  I did the computer 
modeling development on it and K1VR and I have constructed 
the first working prototype at his station.  Look for more 
on this next month at Dayton where K1VR will be giving a
presentation on it.

73, John W1FV



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