Topband: 20 40 meter vertical dipole

[Joe Giacobello, K2XX]

Dan, just my personal experiences.

I once lived on the second floor of a garden apartment in central NJ.  I 
was fortunate that a grove of local type trees was allowed to exist by 
the builders and was accessible outside my bedroom window.  On Memorial 
Day at dusk, while most residents were distracted by BBQ parties or at 
the beach, I slinked out and shot up a fishing line into one of the 
trees in the grove.  I quickly dragged up a #24 wire between my window 
and the tree.  It was no more than 25 feet high and probably 40 feet 
long. I tuned it with a simple HB L-Match.  I ran a ground wire along 
the floor from my HT-44 transmitter to the cold water pipe on the toilet 
bowl of my bathroom for a ground connection. It was far from short, i.e, 
ideal.  For years, I routinely worked many CW and SSB QSOs, DX and 
otherwise, on several bands.  My greatest delight was getting up one 
Saturday morning and working a KG6 or some other Pacific entity that is 
no longer extant.

I have since operated from many foreign QTHs, from Europe to Asia to the 
Pacific, under far from ideal conditions, and usually managed to get 
some form of end fed wire up, often under surreptitious conditions.  
It's really quite amazing that I wasn't arrested.  At any rate, I 
strongly recommend an end fed random wire for an easy solution to a less 
than ideal QTH.  Just get one end as high as possible.  The key is a 
short link to ground to your rig and tuner ground connection. The 
ground's tolerable length increases as the frequency of operation gets 
lower.  Barring that, a paralleled bunch of 1/4 wavelength 
counterpoises, one for each band of interest, attached to system ground 
and extended conveniently, but not critically,. will often substitute.  
My experiences indicate that it's no worse than the equivalent dipole.

73, Joe
K2XX
> Dan Bookwalter via Topband <mailto:topband at contesting.com>
> Sunday, August 20, 2017 4:51 PM
> Sorry guys I know this is top band reflector , but ,. you are used to 
> dealing with people with very compromised antenna situations...
> here is my problem...
> I want to get on the air , live/rent in a double ( i freaking hate it 
> , situation is what it is for now) in a neighborhood , I can probably 
> get away with maybe a 50ft vertical wire , will have to use rg8x and 
> remove one of the catv entrances to get it outside...
> Radials are out of the question , I was thinking , can I do some sort 
> of vert dipole arrangement ??? obviously will be limited to the 100w 
> out of the 1KMP...
> thoughts ? other ideas ??
> Dan
>
>
>
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