[TowerTalk] 160meter vetical / Tower, Insulate or Shunt feed?

[Lee Buller]

I would not put it on insulators...and I doubt you could find or afford them.....not cost effective.
 
You could use a plain old dipole or inverted vee.  You could also use ladder line to feed it...not the plastic stuff...but real ladder line, open wire feeder.  Of course you could use coax.  To broaden the bandwidth you could play with a "cage" antenna, but they are difficult to work with and not get tangled up.  I've seen one guy use RG8U for the dipole elements (tied the braid and the center together) to get bandwidth, but he had to have a "come-a-long" to pull the ends up.  It was a heavy antenna.
 
You could put up an inverted - L with a lot of radials...if you have the supports on the other leg.
 
You could gamma match or omega match the tower for 160 with radials.  You might want to put a beam on the top of the tower to act as a capacitance hat.  That would give you some good antennas on 20-10 meters.  (I would love to have one of those StepperIR at that height, or a Force-12, but just about anything would do).  I've had trouble getting this done correctly, but others have had great success with it.  You need a capacitor at the bottm for about 1000 pf or so that can take the rated wattage.
 
Or you could also put a loading coil on the top and a stinger whip....tune it to 160...and you would have a good radiator.
 
If you really want to have some fun on receive...put up some beverage antennas.  Now that is fun!
 
your mileage may vary and I am not an expert....just having fun with ham radio
 
Lee - K0WA
 


douglas.snowden at med.va.gov wrote:

I will be getting a 90ft aluminum tower in a couple of weeks - it will be a
Universal Tower with a 26" base section.
I am trying to decide on how I should use it. Having never had a tower that
was high enough to
put decent wires up for the low bands, or even get on 160m, I am looking for
ideas. My thoughts
are: 

1. Put it up in enough concrete to keep the base steady and guy it, and
hang wires from it that i
pull up from pullies. 

2. Same as above, but put 30ft of aluminum in the top and use it as a 160m
vertical. Shunt feed
it. What are your thoughts about also hanging wires from it for other
bands? Too much RF
back to the shack?

3. Put it up with the aluminum tubing on top and insulate the base and
direct feed it? What kind
of base insulators could I use? Wouldn't I need a crane to set it on the
insulators?

The reason I like the idea of hanging wires it because I would like to play
with sloping VEE Beams.
I have several hundred feet to run the wires for a vee beam. 

Doug, N4IJ
Carson, VA




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