Topband: Vertical dipoles in the real world

[Michael Armstrong]

Jim, yes considerable!

A ringo ranger is a vertical half wave using "end feed" and they work
great.  I prefer end feeding, using hte method of the ringo (which is
easy to scale to other bands).  I purchased the 10 meter version some
years back and built ones for all bands to 20 meters by scaling the
end-feed arrangement.

Now for the glory part..... They all worked great.  In fact, with no
radial field whatsoever (which is the reason I tried one in the first
place.... no room for radials at that location), it worked as well as
ANY vertical I Had ever used, including ones WITH extensive radial
fields.  It is not a magic antenna..... it doesn't violate nay laws of
physics, which so many ads seem to try to make you believe these days. 
It DOES, however, work over real earth.  The earth I am referring to is
Arizona earth of the desert dweller variety. 

Here are some of the constraints that applied to my personal
installations:  (1) All were elevated 11 feet from the base to the
ground.  The reason?  Good mounting point at that height, nothing
magical or well reasoned from an RF point of view.  (2) I didn't try to
make one that was allband in nature.  Feeding something like that seemed
almost impossible, but I suspect it could be done with some analysis. 
(3) No radial field, as I already mentioned. (4) They were of plumber's
delight construction and were, thus, easily grounded. (5) They were 100
percent aluminum, except for the coaxial capacitor which, along with the
single turn coil, is the other part of the matching network.  (6)  They
were as noisy on receive as any other vertical I have ever erected, so
no unexplanable improvements there (unfortunately). 

Performance?  YES!  Again, nothing magical, but given my results and
sparse use of my amplifier, I considered them good, solid, useful
antennas that, apparently, exhibited little actual loss.  On many more
than a single occasion, I beat out pile-ups with those antennas.  Again,
not saying anything magical here..... I DO have some operating skill
when it comes to chasing DX..... probably from having been DX a time or
three.  I will say that in less than a year, I worked DXCC+ on each band
separately.  By the way, this was 2 years ago, so we weren't even in a
part of the sunspot cycle that favors 10 meters (yet). 

Oh, and with some easy engineering, you can lay them down at the drop of
a hat.  Also, one could easily see that turning an end-fed vertical into
a driven element for a vertical beam isn't even a stretch.  Hope this
helped.

Mike AB7ZU


On 21-Sep-12 06:38, Jim Brown wrote:
> On 9/20/2012 2:55 PM, wa3mej at comcast.net wrote:
>> Does anyone have any real world experience with these dipoles?
>
> Not on Topband, but I rigged a vertical dipole for 40M in one of my
> tall redwoods with the top insulator up about 100 ft.  It worked, but
> not very well, not nearly as well as the horizontal dipoles at the
> same height.
>
> If I had ONLY a single skyhook for an antenna that needed to work
> ABOVE 160, I would use it to hang either a traditional vertical over
> radials, or an inverted Vee. On 160, it would definitely be a vertical
> over radials.
>
> BTW -- a half wave dipole for 160M is about 260 ft.
>
> 73, Jim K9YC
>
>
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