Topband: Low band antenna project questions

[jpescatore at aol.com]

Gary - I've had a 51' T up for 6 or 7 years now and it is a very good transmit antenna on 160. It is resonant on 160, with about 16 radials out now, so don't need a tuner there. I've tried it on other bands with a tuner in the shack, and performance is horrible. On most bands, it heard/talked worse than a mutliband vertical I had up for a while and is many dB below my 135' OCF dipole at the same height on every band other than 160. I think I modeled it once using one of the online programs and you can see a very spiky pattern.

Could have been so much loss in the coax that a base of the antenna tuner might change things but I wouldn't want that to be my only HF antenna.

73 John K3TN