[TowerTalk] Vertical

[Gary Johnson]

>Slightly off target subject but does anyone have experience with the Cushcraft R9 or the Hygain AV680 verticals. Looking for a wireless 40-80 option for winter while my tower is renovated. Thanks in advance all. John WB8LXE 

I helped a friend with a new R9. The big problem is very narrow usable bandwidth especially on 80, where as I recall it’s about 25 kHz 3:1.  Almost as narrow on 40. He’s a new ham who mostly does FT8 on the low bands so we tuned it to those freqs. Speaking of which, we must have tilted that thing up and down 20 times to get it tuned. VERY tweaky. Don’t even think of tuning it without a VNA or analyzer with a good graphic display of SWR vs. freq.  In contrast, my R6000 was not difficult at all to tune and has good bandwidth, but of course it only goes down to 20m.

Gary NA6O