I have used the 4el SteppIR at AI6V's (SK) Aruba home a few times. Being a contester I had hardly ever operated on the WARC bands and I had an absolute blast using the SteppIR on 12m and 17m. Unfortunately the SteppIR quit working about a year ago and it has not been repaired. Two things not mentioned in your summary is the wait for the antenna to adjust when changing bands and that you cannot operate on two bands simultaneously.
John KK9A aka P40A Bill Frantz frantz at pwpconsult.com Mon May 2 14:16:47 EDT 2016 The responses about SteppIR antennas have died down so here is, as promised, the summary. Five people reported no problems with a total of 39 years of experience. An additional responder had no problems, but did not give the length of his experience. One of these responders is near the ocean. Another responder lives in coastal New England where he experiences high winds, but reports no weather related damage. He has not had a major ice storm, but did have damage from a lightning strike. Three people report failures in the EHU (the device that moves the extensible antenna element), including one "out of the box", two due to lightning strikes, and one due to an hour of 120 MPH winds. Another reports having to lower the antenna 4 times since 2004 for unspecified repairs. Several people point out that SteppIR has made significant improvements over the last 15 years, fixing some of the problems that caused early failures. One said that he had fewer problems with his 13 year old SteppIR than he had had with a Butternut vertical. Many say they get performance similar to what they would get with a bunch of monoband Yagis. Some sing the praises of crank-up/tilt-over towers to make antenna access easy. My take on all this is that the SteppIR antennas are significant mechanical devices, much more complex than multi and monobanders. Since any antenna can fail, there should be a repair plan for antennas. Given the time I've spent repairing my wire antennas, SteppIRs don't seem to be particularly unreliable. 73 Bill AE6JV ______________________________________________________________ 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 Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
