[TowerTalk] OWA Inventor?

[Jim Thomson]

Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2013 15:33:08 -0600
From: Kelly Taylor <ve4xt at mymts.net>
To: Steve Sacco NN4X <nn4x at embarqmail.com>, <towertalk at contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] OWA Inventor?


##  The OWA  doesn’t use TWO driven elements.  That was a KLM concept.
The OWA only uses ONE driven element... with the 1st director closed spaced.
I bought YO  4.0 when it 1st came out.....and it would not allow you to space any
two elements any closer than .09 wavelength.  Thus there was no way to arrive at the
OWA design.  Ditto  with.... yagimax that came out aprx the same time. 

##  The late VE7WJ, Henry Thel,  once gave a talk about the importance of using close
spacing between the single DE..and the 1st director.  That was back in the late 70s. 
N6BT came out with OWA, direct 50 ohm fed monobanders for 20-15-10-6m
I think in the early 90s.   Dunno who cooked up the original design, or which software
they used, but the concept works superb.  The OWA design has also been used on hb 5-el,
20m monoband yagis , with great success. 

##  The F12 OWA, direct 50 ohm fed yagis  are killer ants.

Jim   VE7RF





Virtually every reference on Google searches to the Optimized Wideband
Antenna refers to WA3FET as the inventor. None refers to N6BT. Most also
co-credit K3LR for the OWA.

You might be able to outfox some Google search results, but not every single
one.

N6BT's contribution, which I don't mean to disparage, is a system to couple
multiple driven elements parasitically to eliminate traps in multi-band
antennas. He referred to them as multi-monoband arrays, since most of the
F12 antennas use discrete elements for each band of operation rather than
using traps to multipurpose elements.

The OWA, if I recall correctly, was around before Force12 was even a gleam
in N6BT's eyes. And, again IIRC, the OWA is a monoband antenna that uses TWO
driven elements and specific element spacing to provide consistent gain,
matching and F/B over a greater portion of a particular band than typical.

73, kelly
ve4xt