Stan wrote: > I'd like to offer the following Youtube demonstration to such listers > who might be interested.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWkpQ785Pjo That is an interesting demonstration, Stan. I have a couple of questions. It is stated that the VSWR was no greater than 1.4:1 on 40 through 10 meters. But it appears to me that these figures report only the lowest VSWR that the K2's ***ATU*** could produce, NOT the actual VSWR that existed on the antenna side of the ATU. That seems at best be a measure of K2 ATU performance. It says nothing substantive about the characteristics of the attached antenna. :-) If that is correct, do you have any figures for the VSWR that the antenna with transmission line actually presents to the tuner? The impedance plots from a good antenna analyzer would be most interesting. Why use thin 20 awg wire along the mast as the radiator? In my 35 years of experimenting with portable wire antennas, I found nothing but trouble when using such extremely small diameter wire. Instead, for more than 15 years I've used 14 awg Flexweave-tm which consists of 168 very fine strands of copper. It is a dream to use, and it never suffers fatigue failure. I've never had a portable wire antenna to fail since I started using Flexweave. It's available bare or insulated, and either will tolerate frequent spooling and un-spooling for the life of the antenna. I also question the use of 22 awg wire in the toroidal transformer. Such small conductors represent just as much RF loss at QRP as at 200 watts. Much larger conductors would be appropriate there as well. There is no advantage to small conductors in any HF antenna design, especially for QRP use. I also cringe at the RG-174 coax crowd. :-) 73, Mike / KK5F ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
