[TowerTalk] Open wire line convert

[Joe Reisert]

Tom,

Don't forget to mention that all of W1EVT's open wire runs are several 
1,000 feet long from the culvert under the road to the top of a high hill 
quite a way away and he mostly operates 80 and some 40 Meters. It is also 
was a business venture and coax would have been out of the question for 16 
runs!

At 06:48 AM 9/14/00 -0600, n4kg@juno.com wrote:

>Just because open wire line isn't a viable solution for YOU
>doesn't mean that it isn't a viable solution for OTHERS
>and should be banned from existence as you seem to argue.

I believe your claim about Clem's his 5BDXCC is bogus. I believe W4DR holds 
that distinction and I doubt that Clem would have ever claimed he was 
working on it no less apply for same!  The Clem I know is just a DXer and 
not an award chaser or competitor of that sort. He enjoys working JA's at 
sunrise and on the winter sunset long path around Christmas.

>W1EVT, winner of the first 5BDXCC, uses 4 wire open wire
>lines to run under the road and up the hill to his 19 towers
>with 3 sets of stacked wire arrays (two half waves in phase
>stacked every half wavelength) for every band.

BTW, I get a kick out of K7GCO's claim about using teflon insulators from 
the 30's (the decade when he was born!). As I recall, the material we now 
call Teflon (RTM) or PTFE was invented by Dupont in the 1950s!

I have also used open wire line over the years but particularly on my 432 
extended expanded collinear EME array. You can see it in full in my article 
in QST, December 1974, page 38, "VHF Antenna Arrays for High Performance", 
by W6FZJ/1. I later abandoned open wire line because it had radiation loss 
(even at 0.75" spacing!) and every time the humidity went up a few points 
or an insect walked across the "Teflon"insulators, the VSWR went through 
the sky!

>Several of my dipoles are fed with ladderline and used
>successfully on multiple bands.  I have no problem
>with running the ladderline across my yard suspended
>from tree limbs and guy wires.

73,

Joe, W1JR



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