[TowerTalk] remote tuner Vs lumped constants

[Jim Brown]

On 7/24/2013 11:25 AM, K8RI wrote:
>
> The fan dipole on 75 can  give much wider, usable areas.
> With SS amps I'd like to be able to QSY with all the knob twisting. 

Yes. It's easy to make wire spreaders by cutting 1/2-in PVC conduit into 
18-in lengths and drilling holes for the wires. If one of the wires is 
bare copper, the spreaders can be held in place with wire looped across 
the spreader and soldered.  I use hard drawn copper that I "make" by 
buying #8 bare copper from a big box store, tying one end around a tree 
and the other around a trailer hitch, and slowly stretching it until it 
breaks. The resulting hard drawn copper has stretched by roughly 10%.

I consider copperweld antenna wire a terrible choice for serious antenna 
work. My neighbor, W6GJB, built a 2-wire fan dipole using copperweld and 
RG8, and hoisted it between a couple of redwoods with pulleys on both 
ends and a weight on one end. It was on the ground the next day -- the 
copperweld broke.  We rebuilt it with the hard drawn copper.

The Power Point shows another elegantly simple and effective method of 
broadbanding many resonant antennas that W6NL teaches in his classes at 
Stanford. With SimSmith, you can simultaneously model both SWR and loss, 
making it easy to optimize a design.

73, Jim K9YC