Hello Larry,
Have you considered building a linear loaded dipole, and installing it
as a sloper? Standard ladder line works great for this puropose -
particularly for the antenna elements themselves. The resulting
impedance is such that it'll match coax very well, but you could
certainly feed it with ladder line as well. I built one for 40 meters
and used it for several years with great success working DX. As a plus,
because of the linear loading, the total length of the antenna is about
65% that of a standard dipole. I've only recently changed to a
half-sloper since I now have a small tower and some aluminum in the air
to act as a capacity hat. However, I don't have enough of a capacity hat
for an 80 meter half-sloper, so I'm going to be building another linear
loaded full-sloper myself for 80m in a couple of weeks.
The ARRL Antenna Book has excellent information regarding this type of
antenna. Specifically, I have the 19th edition of the handbook here, and
the information on linear loading begins on page 6-21. In case you have
another version of the handbook, it's in the chapter titled
"Low-Frequency Antennas".
It sounds like you could easily find a tree that would allow you to
slope an ~86 foot dipole. When I was using the 40m sloper, the bottom
end of the sloper was only about 3 feet above ground, and as I said, the
antenna worked great. No radials required either.
73, Dale WA8SRA
Larry Loen wrote:
Well, I'm feeling a bit stuck.
I studied around and decided I wanted to give the Sigma 80 a try.
Vertical dipole looked like a good idea.
Problem is, it seems to be universally backordered, so that's out. A
friend who has them (and likes them) suggests I may wait quite a while
to get one. Nothing on eBay either, I looked.
I may just settle for ordering the HF9V, a mult-band vertical, and have
done with it.
I was thinking of doing that anyway as a secondary antenna to put out a
bit better signal on all bands. If you're a popgun, one way to make up
for it is to get on as many bands as you can.
But, will it do the job on 80? Like most verticals of this sort, it has
a fairly narrow bandwidth, but so would the sigma. The real question is
whether it will "get out" well enough on transmit.
Someone claims to have done 5BDXCC with it from Germany, so I suppose
it's got enough distance in it to do the job. Maybe.
And, presumably, it is actually in stock, so I can get it up before the
snow flies around here.
Not what I was really looking for, but maybe it will do. I can see
myself throwing radials on the ground this winter in addition to
whatever I can bury this fall, still.
Any other last minute suggestions? This is like Plan C.
Larry WO0Z
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