[TowerTalk] Vertical balun

[K3BU at aol.com]

In a message dated 12/19/03 8:00:44 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
mchilkuri at kasnet.com writes:
>>I wound
the coax around a 3.5" dia 12" former at the point the feeder enters the
shack - Viola......it cured all my RFI problems.<<


I hated baluns after I fried Hi-Q balun, which stunk for years (fried ferrite 
rod). They don't like high SWR, like accidentally firing kW into it on wrong 
band. 

The safest is the coax choke as above, especially if you need multi frequency 
coverage. For monoband "baluning" I prefer quarter wave bazooka stubs. They 
serve as a filters, they widen the bandwidth of the antenna, nothing to burn, 
nothing to saturate.

As far as matching low impedance verticals to 50 ohms, I use few turns of 
copper tubing coil wound on a beer bottle, connect it between the ground/radial 
point and bottom of radiator. Find 50 ohm impedance point between the gnd and 
up the coil. Remove unnecessary turns and you have solid DC connection to 
ground for static discharge and foolproof matching with nothing to burn. The loss 
(little bit of "base loading") isn't any worse than any other tricks.

Yuri, K3BU