[TowerTalk] 160 meter vertical

Jim Brown jim at audiosystemsgroup.com
Wed Sep 27 12:36:40 EDT 2006


On Wed, 27 Sep 2006 09:50:17 -0500, K4SAV wrote:

>A 45 ft vertical for 160 is a little problematic.

Yes, but it can be made to work with a lot of top loading in the 
form of a capacity hat, and an effective counterpoise or radials. 
Will it be as good as a quarter wave? Of course not. But it will 
work. In general, the shorter the antenna, the more important the 
radials. The more top loading the better, but it will load fine if 
you have enough loading to get it within range of your antenna 
tuner. 

Very effective top loading can be obtained as simply as suspending 
a vertical wire from a horizontal wire hung between two trees or a 
tree and a house or a house and a tower, connecting the vertical 
wire to the horizontal wire. Or it can be an inverted L. The 
vertical wire will do most of the radiating, the transmitter sees 
the length of vertical wire plus the length/capacitance of the 
horizontal wire. 

There are good discussions of antennas like this in Kraus (W8JK), 
and ON4UN's book (Low Band DXing), which is an excellent resource 
for 160/80/40 antennas. The vertical I described in an earlier 
post in this thread works as the "T" form -- I tie both sides of 
the feedline together and load it against 25 radials (and will add 
more). In Chicago, I had a few short radials and a big wrought 
iron fence. I wasn't the strongest signal on the band, but over 
about two years, I had a lot of fun in contests and worked the 
lower 48 and 20 countries. 

73,

Jim Brown K9YC




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