[TowerTalk] 80 Meter beam

Bob Shohet, KQ2M kq2m at kq2m.com
Fri Mar 31 10:54:55 EDT 2017


Hi Martin,

In the late 70’s and early ‘80’s, Gene KR2N (ex-WB2FZO) had 2 Inverted V’s on 80 meters fed with RG-213 on a ~ 42’ boom up at 120’.  He fed them with a T connector to which I believe was one 1/4 wave phased line of RG11 and he switched the direction 180 degrees with the use of 2 DPDT 120 vac relays mounted in a hand-made aluminum box made from sheet metal.   The antenna was a KILLER on 80.  He used antenna wire pigtails attached by alligator clips to change the resonant freq. from CW to SSB and back again.

I can attest to how well the antenna worked – in the 1980 CQWWCW I had the World-high score and set a New US record on 80 meters, operating from his station.  Some excerpts from the log included:

Only North American station in the log of UK0AAB
JA runs BOTH mornings!
Duped by VK6HD on both mornings.
A run of 5-watt UA9 stations!

I could work anything that I could hear and many mults called me that didn’t even call the M/M stations on in the contest.

Later I used the same design for a 40-M antenna at my station that was switchable and reversible.

I heartily recommend the antenna and the switchable design.  It is relatively inexpensively, easy to build and readily available parts and gives exceptional performance!

73

Bob, KQ2M


From: Martin Pelt 
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2017 8:00 AM
To: towertalk at contesting.com 
Subject: [TowerTalk] 80 Meter beam

I am putting a 80 meter 2 element inverted vee beam up. It will be at 120
feet with 39 foot boom.

I have 2 questions dealing with switching from phone to cw without lowering
elements and using jumpers.

I plan to use ladder line on driven element coming down to tuner to switch
from cw/ssb. Will this work or is there a better way ?

On the reflector I thought maybe cutting it for ssb the having inductor
with relay at the center to switch to CW. Is this the best way ? If so how
can I easily measure resonate frequency with inductor inserted at the
center ?

73 Martin N4UU
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