[TowerTalk] 160m OCF etc

[john at kk9a.com]

There are always other options. With a 51' high support you could put up a
shortened vertical or an Inverted L and have a pretty good top band
antenna.


To:	 towertalk <towertalk at contesting.com>
Subject: [TowerTalk] 160m OCF etc
From:	 r miles <greenacres113 at charter.net>
Date:	 Wed, 5 Jun 2013 08:23:23 -0400 (EDT)


I won't try to comment on the theory of the engineers. I can just speak of
my personal experience with one. Because of the location of the center
support I had to try an OCF. My short side actually sloped a bit. I simply
put a half wave long 160m OCF with the peak height of 51'. 50 ohm coax to
a 4:1 balun at the feed point. It was no world beater but in 3 yr.s
running 500w I did work 127 DXCC entities. In 54 yr.s in the hobby I still
tell new OPs: try it. If you are limited by whatever reason give your
antenna thoughts a real world try. Don't let the nay sayers put you off.
Put up what you can & see if it works. We are experimenters. That's why we
are called amateur operators. One of the new hams in our club lives in an
apartment. He's playing with a very small loop on HF. In the last few
months he's wrkd about a dozen entities. Not too bad. He put up something
& gave it a try.
Every antenna we consider standard started life as an experiment....

K9IL