[TowerTalk] Non-traditional antenna designs

[Joe Reisert]

Steve Etal,

Mike at Traffie Technology made me a specially built mono-band Hex beam to 
test at my QTH for 40 meters. It has been up about 3 years.

It is optimized for the CW portion of 40 meters and has a reasonable F/B 
ratio (12 dB or so) there but drops to about 5-6 dB in the phone band (as 
measured by my HP 8753C network analyzer on a 250 foot range). A crude gain 
measurement says it's down about 2 dB in forward gain at 7.2 versus 7.0 
MHz. In other words, it is very narrowband.

Performance is mixed. I am fairly competitive on 40 meters but I am sure 
from the performance that it is not as good as the Cuchcraft 40-2CD I had 
up before.

I think it is unique mechanically in its 5 band configuration and the 
Bouvet 3Y0C operation last year showed that. A trap beam would not have 
survived at Bouvet but the Hex beam was easily repaired.

It's not a full size antenna, it looks weird (like an inverted umbrella) 
and I doubt all the anecdotal claims but it does fill a niche.

73,

Joe, W1JR


At 02:47 PM 1/29/2002 -0500, K7LXC@aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 1/29/02 9:00:21 AM Pacific Standard Time, w8ji@akorn.net
>writes:
>
> > > stature, to be installed at a later date. I am very insecure about the
> >  > HexBeam and am now carefully considering the Force 12 antennas. I'll
> >  > keep you all posted.
> >
> >  You should be insecure about the Hex beam. There is far too much
> >  hyperbole and far too few facts offered in the claims.
>
>     I'm a huge skeptic of the performance of 'new', non-traditional antenna
>designs. I went to the Hex website and founds loads of anecodotal information
>and lots of 'smoke and mirrors' about how it's angles have to do with
>"reflected path performance" and other hyperbole. Also, there's lots of
>technical mumbo jumbo (I'm not an antenna engineer or expert so I can't
>comment authoritatively about the calcs and formulas) about the antenna as
>well as comments about 'tests' that were conducted with no other info
>available.
>
>     In the Hex website was a copy of a CQ magazine review by Lew "I never 
> met
>an antenna I didn't like" McCoy. Some more interesting anecdotal information.
>
>     I'm also skeptical about the RAI Beam and others. Let me say that I'm
>sure that these antennas 'radiate.' Whether they live up to their claims is
>the question. N6BT had some fun using a lightbulb as an HF antenna so it also
>radiated. In the case of our antenna testing, we found that Force 12 was the
>only manufacturer whose published antenna specs corroborated our findings.
>
>     I'm hoping to be able to test these and other antennas for a future
>update to our tribander comparison report but need a technical guy who can
>run the test equipment and help interpret and help write-up the results.
>Testing will take place in Washington State later in the year. Let me know if
>you're interested in co-authoring the third edition.
>
>     In the case of our tests, we have published the protocol so that anyone
>can repeat our findings. Nothing like that ever appears in any antenna
>advertising (with the exception of Force 12) so ALL antenna manufacturer's
>performance claims are suspect. And some of them are TOTALLY WRONG.
>
>Cheers,
>Steve    K7LXC
>Tower Tech
>
>PS. Our tribander and vertical comparison reports are available from <A
>HREF="http://www.championradio.com">www.championradio.com</A> .
>
>________________________________________________________________________
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