Another Windom, Really?

Well,

Having been thinking a little about my antennas I decided to take down the wire dipoles I have for 40M and 30M and try and squeeze in a full size Windom. It has fitted in the garden but the configuration is a little strange! It's kind of in a square where the feedpoint is in one of the corners.

Here's the dimensions of the antenna:

And here are the SWR readings I am getting in the shack starting at 80M:

40M:

30M:

20M:

17M:

15M:

12M:

10M:

So, all in all it looks quite promising! Time will tell as band conditions have been appalling over the past few days.

Here's a picture of our Elmo as he returned from the groomers yesterday - he was suitably unimpressed!

 Local conditions.

Wow - that's Windy!

Well,

We had quite a storm in the UK yesterday; luckily I wasn't at home to witness it else I would have been in a real panic I would imagine! Anyhow, the winds were extreme to say the least and this morning I look up at the main antenna and I see this:

The top of the mast is at a definite angle compared to the rest of it, so I turned the antenna to the West - this is the direction I point it when I want to tip it over - looking up again once it was turned that way and everything looked fine! Hmmm, something not so clever here. I started to drop the tower and the antennas all started turning as gravity wanted them to. It seemed that the stub mast to the rotator from the main mast was no longer attached to the square section at all!

Here's what I found when I brought the tower down:

So the three bolts I used as part of the re-engineered top of the tower from back here:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/changes-at-top.html

have snapped clean off. The power of the wind is amazing.

So I've put it back together with some suitable modifications; hopefully this won't happen again.

Scary, egh?

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?