Topband: Vertical dipoles in the real world

[Eddy Swynar]

On 2012-09-20, at 5:55 PM, wa3mej at comcast.net wrote:

> 
> 
> I noticed that some of the DXpeditions are using vertical diipoles next to the sea on at least some of the higher bands ( I am guessing 20 and up).  I stuffed the data into EZNEC 5.0 and came up with some suprising results, hope I did it correctly I am not an antenna guru . Now as Tom has just indicated modeling is great but its only modeling it doesnt really tell what happens in the real world/ground conditions etc. 
> 
> Does anyone have any real world experience with these dipoles?  Do they work in non beach environments such as near the mountians? Comments welcome... and I am willing to take the comments off list if it suits you. 
> 
> If this is not a fools folley I will put together what I find suprising and put it on my web site for everyone to access but I dont to take the time to document it if its a waste of time.  


Hi Jim,

Back some 30 years ago, or so, we had just moved to a brand new house that was blessed with a back yard full of tall, majestic poplar dollars---and I was blessed with a perpetually empty bank account, so I had no tower!

The solution? I erected a 20-meter "gossimer(sp?) yagi" made out of wire with wood spreaders, & I hoisted it up over a convenient tree limb; I then pulled the thing taught, & attached a ground mounted rotator. 

VOILA! 

A rotatable 2-element yagi that would serve my needs until such time as the pin money would allow me to erect a 48' self-supportinhg tower / Hy-Gain TH3 beam...

It worked extremely well for me---certainly MUCH better than any of the other wire antennas that I'd tried to that point. I even wrote-up an article on it that CQ magazine published in '82.

My only regret was that I never had the "altitude" to put up something similar for 40-meters! Now THAT would have really been something...

~73~ de Eddy VE3CUI - VE3XZ