[TowerTalk] Rigging Dipoles and Growing Old

[Wes Attaway (N5WA)]

-----Original Message-----
From: towertalk-bounces at contesting.com
[mailto:towertalk-bounces at contesting.com]On Behalf Of
k2qmf at juno.com
Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2005 6:27 PM
To: finger at goeaston.net
Cc: towertalk at contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Rigging Dipoles and Growing Old


Note: all previous responses have been "cut".

I have long been a fan of the OWL-fed dipole with balun and
tuner.  However, when I moved to a new house (on a small lot but
with quite a few nice tall Pines) this past winter I wanted to
get something up quick.  Most of my "stuff" was in boxes, so I
swallowed my pride and ordered an 80-meter Carolina Windom.  I
threw it up about 70' (pulleys and lines had been installed by
tree climbers during construction) and I fired up the new Orion
and have been having a blast.

It is performing far better than I expected.  I've worked 255
countries in all directions using casual CW in my spare time
(mostly just in the evenings) in the last 6 months.  It works
great on all bands.  The Orion tuner (and the old Alpha 76
Pi-Net) tune it just fine on all bands.  I know it probably has
an inefficient balun at the feedpoint, and the RG8X is not the
lowest loss stuff in the world, and I have 175' of Bury-Flex just
to get to the ground-level feedpoint, but the darn thing really
works.

I am going to put up an OWL-fed dipole to do some comparative
testing, but for now I am pretty happy.

My advice:  Forget the OWL, forget the RG8 feed, get (or build) a
Carolina Windom.  It may not actually work better than a dipole
but the feed impedance seems to behave a lot better.  Being able
to eliminate the external tuner is a big relief as far as I am
concerned.