[Towertalk] 40 meters

[David L. Thompson]

The best Field Day antenna I have ever used was a Hornet (later Swan Hornet)
2 el 40 meter beam.
The antenna looked like a 2 el 20 meter ith 36 foot elements and short boom
(maybe 16 feet).  The Hornet was about the size and weight of my Gonset 3 el
tri-bander we used on 20    We put it up on a 40 foot Rohn 25 and the next
year on a small vrank up.   We had 3 of the 40 foot Rohn towers
that were installed on the concrete base plates  held down by spikes and
guyed.   With three people or more we had all three up in less than an hour.
(Tower and beams).

One year we decided to go simple and used three of the 135 foot wire
antennas fed with open wire (not ladder line).   WE used homebrew tuners
that were described in QST back in the early 60's.    One was for 10/15 and
75, one was for 40 and 80, and one was dedicated to 20.   You need to put
them up as close to broadside to where most stations will be (NE/SW or N/S)
in Mississippi.   The 40 and 20 worked great and plenty of DX called in on
20.   We worked KC4USA on 40 SSB and ran JA's on 40 CW.

Results were down slightly from the past year (we fell from #1 in 3A to #5)
but then again the real problem was almost no 10 short skip and limited 15
meter opening.   Most of the weekend we could only work W6, South America,
and a few VE1's.   A W9 group we talked to on 29.6FM told us that they made
only one page of 10 meter contacts and a dozen qso's on 15.

73 Dave K4JRB