On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 2:15 PM, Scott Graham <n0n...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ...an excellent design for a "random wire"...? > ======= Scott, for years my main shack antenna was a wire running out the window to a tree in my yard, a total of 200 feet. It is fed by a unun which in turn is fed by about 25' of coax. The unun is on the windowsill of the second-floor shack, and the antenna wire comes right inside. The cold side of the unun is connected to a 4-wire counterpoise that has lengths corresponding roughly to 1/4 wave on 40, 20 and 10 meters. This mess runs out the window and is arrayed on the garage roof. Between the unun and the radio is a common mode choke that I got from radioworks.com. I have zero problem with RF in the shack with 100W. When I went to 500W I had to tweak the counterpoise a few times to get RF down to zero on 12 Meters. The tuner in the K3 matches this antenna to 1.2:1 or better on all bands 80, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12 and 10. I have worked 280 countries with this antenna. Its main drawback is that it is noisy on reception. When I finally got a hexbeam (a compact 2-el yagi) mounted on my chimney at 20', it was an improvement not so much for the modest amount of gain it offered, but for the reduced noise. This is the second antenna setup I have had along these lines. Both have been extremely successful, especially when you consider the cost (just a few bucks), the unobtrusiveness, the ease of setup, and the ease of maintenance, tuning etc. If you try one and have questions, email me. Best of luck! 73, Tony KT0NY -- http://www.isb.edu/faculty/facultydir.aspx?ddlFaculty=352 ______________________________________________________________ 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
