Saturday, 10 August 2013

So who is Caroline? Ah, Carolina Windom!

Well,

In my never ending fashion of fiddling with antennas, I have just replaced my 40M dipole with an off-centre fed dipole. This should be equally as resonant on 40M but also give me an alternative antenna for the other HF bands. Really I can only expect a close to resonance on 40, 20, 15 and 10 - the antenna will be a major compromise on the WARC bands (30, 17, 12).

So, having had a rummage in the ARRL antenna handbook and also a quick search using Google, I came up with this basic design (0 points of originality claimed here):


So, what's it like? Well initially I can see that I certainly have an antenna connected to the radio - so it is not just a dummy load. Here's what the antenna analyser makes of the antenna:

40M:


20M:


15M:


10M:

As expected on the WARC bands it's not so hot, 30M:



It looks remarkably OK on 17M:




And ditto on 12M:


So, a complete compromise antenna that's just 66 feet long. Looks like it might work though.

Here's the two ham cats meeting for the first time:



What do you recon? Interesting, egh? 

No comments:

Post a Comment