Follow-up -- forgot 160m antennas. While a full-sized dipole or inverted vee is nice for NVIS, there are options for smaller lots.
A full-size dipole is in the ballpark of 250 feet total length, but a full-size full-wave loop is only 60 feet or so on a side. Feed it either in the middle of one side or at a corner. It's fairly close to 50 ohm impedance, and you might even be able to get by without an antenna tuner if you restrict your frequency coverage (1.8 to 2.0 MHz is a 10% change in frequency!) and tune the antenna carefully. A shorter inverted vee will also work well on 160 -- the trick here is to *NOT* try to use coax cable for the feedline. With an antenna that's only half-size, the feedpoint impedance will have a low resistive component but will have a lot of reactance -- meaning the VSWR on the line will be terrible. Feeding with coax will result in all your power being consumed in feedline losses. To get around that, the two common tricks are to use the feedline as part of the radiator (short the inner and outer conductors together at the antenna tuner, and connect them to the antenna tuner long-wire output, feeding it against ground). The other (and, in my book, preferred) solution is to put up whatever size of dipole or inverted vee you can, and feed it with ladder line. Either trick requires a tuner that will handle 160 meters, though. > Andrew O'Brien wrote: >> I do not have real estate for 160M either. So what >> bands and "regular" antennas do you use for this ? >
