[TowerTalk] upgrading from a G5RV

[Jim Brown]

On Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:43:15 EDT, KI9A at aol.com wrote:

>After some serious tree trimming, I now have room to fit a full 
>sized wire antenna where my G5RV is right now. I am thinking 
>about a 135' open wire fed dipole, as multi bands are needed. 

You left out the most important part -- what bands does this antenna 
need to cover? I have two 80/40 fan dipoles at right angles to each 
other. One of them also has loading coils to allow it to load on 160M. 
I'm feeding them with about 120 ft of RG11. Both of these antennas load 
and work very well on all of 80M (I mostly work CW, but use them up to 
above 3875 during SSB contests), 40M, 30M, 17M, 15M, and 12M. One of 
them even works well on 6M!  On all of the bands listed, the SWR is 
below 2.5:1 at the transmitter end (except for the top of 75, where 
it's above 3:1). Aluminum is not very practical at my QTH, so I have 
fan dipoles for 20/15/10 at right angles to each other fed with RG8. 

Fan dipoles are pretty easy and inexpensive to build. If anyone's 
interested, I can post a piece I wrote for the NCCC newsletter with 
some construction hints. These antennas all have good coax chokes at 
the feedpoint, so they're pretty quiet. 

73,

Jim K9YC