Last year at the K4SV Greer (SC) ARC FD operation we decided to be loud
on 40 meters. N5CQ designed and built a 3 element wire inverted beam for
the CW station that we spent a good part of the Friday before FD
installing in 90 degree weather. The CW station had a Hexbeam for the
high bands, the wire beam for 40, and an endfed halfwave for 80.
We were running 2A and spent most of the daylight hours Saturday on the
high bands. Late that afternoon a big thunderstorm rolled through the
area, and we were forced to disconnect all the antennas until it passed.
When we went to 40 on the CW station that night we were doing pretty
good but didn't seem to be a dominant force. A few hours in, we decided
to reverse the beam, which entailed an excursion out in the darkness to
find and change the ends of the parasitic elements. It was EXTREMELY
difficult to find the ends, but we eventually got it done. That exercise
didn't seem to make a great difference in signals from the west. Later
we tried to make some QSOs on 80 and there were very few stations on (we
thought).
It was only when we were tearing down Sunday that we realized what had
happened. In the scramble to get going after the thunderstorm shutdown
we had swapped the feedlines to the antenna switch for the wire beam and
the endfed. We had been making all our QSOs on 40 with the endfed, and
of course the 40 beam was an extremely terrible antenna for 80. It's a
tribute to the excellent tuner on the K3S that it made the transmitter
happy on 80, but that didn't help actually radiating a decent signal. So
we never got to find out how well the wire beam actually worked.
This year we're going to mark all the feedlines much better.
73...
Randy, W8FN
On 5/21/2026 11:08, Wayne Burdick via Elecraft wrote:
Thanks for all the stories, everyone. Keep the faith (despite the odds),
and we'll see you at FD.
Wayne
N6KR
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