[TowerTalk] 100ft 80meter Yagi

[Jim Lux]

At 11:32 AM 3/31/2006, W3TX wrote:
>Denis,
>
>Just having a brainwave here after reading your e-mail.
>
>What would happen if you expanded the OWA concept.
>
>Instead of two closely spaced elements, perhaps three (3)?  That would be a
>total of six elements.
>
>Needs to be modeled, but my thought is to expand the bandwidth by exploiting
>another closely spaced element and then to also shorten that boom to 100ft.
>
>I agree with getting out of the relay game.  Life is easy when points of
>failure are minimized!!


If the only concern is with relay reliability, what you save in dollars and 
hassle in having fewer elements might more than make up for either of two 
strategeies
a) a better quality relay (and yes, there are relays that can be expected 
to run trouble free for 20 years.. they use them in spacecraft and 
unattended stations, for instance)
b) any of several strategies that use more than one relay to create a fault 
tolerant set.

You don't need a huge amount of reactance to shift the resonances, and it 
shouldn't be a problem to make the loss of that reactance lower than that 
of the element itself (if for no other reason than it's unlikely you'll 
wind a coil out of aluminum tubing)

Jim, W6RMK