[TowerTalk] 40/80m dipole

[Jim Brown]

On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:02:37 -0700, Tom Osborne wrote:

>Right.  And, bandwidth will be a lot better with the parallel dipoles. 
>Sometimes, shortening a dipole can really make them kinda narrow.  

While I'm a fan of fan dipoles and have four of them in the air, I'm going to 
take a contrarian viewpoint, in view of the fact that his space is limited, 
and that there is a very nice loaded dipole you can buy that will fit it. 

Look for a small ad in the back of QST for HyPower Antenna Company (or google 
to find them), and buy the "long" 80M loaded dipole. It acts like a half wave 
dipole on 40M and a loaded dipole on 80M. I used it a lot in Chicago on a lot 
where it barely fit. It was only up about 35 ft, but it worked quite well. 
Yes, you WILL need an antenna tuner on it, but I tuned it to about 3570 and 
used it from the bottom of CW up to about 3900. I ran legal power it at 
contesting duty cycles, and the loading coils were none the worse for wear 
when I took it down to bring it with me to California. 

BTW -- if you feed this thing with very low Z twinlead (like heavy zip cord), 
you can tie both sides of the feedline together and load it on 80 and 160M as 
a Tee vertical against some radials. It works quite well that way too. 

73,

Jim K9YC